Frances Farmer

"There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream."

"I didnt think then, and I still dont, that I was actually sick."

"It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it."

"Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after Id had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. "I am clean, now. Ive never been as clean. Ill never be cleaner." And somehow, it was God. I wasnt sure that it was… just something cool and dark and clean."

"I went to Sunday School and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didnt believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true."

"I do not know Tyrone Power. I fucked him a lot, but I do not know him. Gentlemen, this meeting is over."

"If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one."

"I couldnt get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didnt last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasnt God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didnt keep me from enjoying the cleaness any less. I just knew that God wasnt there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget."

"I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness."

"[Hollywood]: Its a nuthouse. The other day a man phoned and wanted me to endorse a certain brand of cigarettes. I had nothing against them and in fact will smoke them or anything else that comes along, but I didnt know why he was bothering me. I thought maybe if I was nice theyd give me a carton as a thank offering, so I rather tentatively broached the matter of remuneration. What was the endorsement worth, I asked, and he said three thousand dollars. What are you going to do in an atmosphere like that?"

"What they had me doing first was autographing copies of Come and Get It at the Bon Marche, where I had been fired a couple of years back. That was bad enough but think of me autographing a book written by somebody else. That took crust but it didnt turn out so badly because when I got to the store, about twenty people finally strolled in and looked at me from a distance and kept their buying firmly in control. What the Goldwyn people had forgotten was that up that way Im still remembered as the freak from West Seattle High."

"The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she is unbearable."