...And You Can Quote Me on That!: Life, Love, Movies...Commentary on the Greatest Quotes You Never Heard!

By Susan Klein

"...And You Can Quote Me on That!" is a collection of a few hundred of the authors favorite quotations, most of which the general public have never heard and/or have never been included in any books of quotations. The author divides the quotations into 19 categories and chapters, from "Mothers Who Love Us" to "Endorphins is God" to "Movies are Magnificent." She tends to be an iconoclast, knocking down some of our most traditional beliefs and replacing them with insights most have never considered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483521572

Book preview

Chapter 1

SEX in America

I’d like to kiss you but I just washed my hair.—Bette Davis, The Cabin in the Cotton

One of the sexiest quotes from the movies. Oozing with subtext. Another quote full of sexual subtext is from True Romance. Drexl (Gary Oldman) is Alabama’s (Patricia Arquette) pimp. When Drexl is told that Clarence (Christian Slater) has married Alabama, Drexl laughs:

I guess that makes us practically related.

In The Thomas Crown Affair, directed by Norman Jewison, there’s subtext in Steve McQueen’s remark to Faye Dunaway after the sexiest game of chess in film:

Let’s play something else.

(The kissing scene that followed— one of the sexiest sequences in film-- took eight hours to shoot.) And in the controversial, sanguinary Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty starts to have sex with Fay Dunaway, but suddenly stops and says:

I told you I warn’t no lover boy.

The unspoken meaning is that Beatty (Clyde) is either gay or asexual. Near the end of the movie Clyde is more successful, and it’s endearing when Bonnie has to reassure him that he did good.

But there was no subtext in Bo Derek’s crass, direct response to Dudley Moore’s question about music in the movie 10, directed by Blake Edwards: Moore: What do you like to do to ‘Bolero’?

Derek: F_ _k.

In 1969, director Paul Mazursky explored the sexual revolution of the 1960s with Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. The four are experimenting with sexual freedom and promiscuity. In one scene Ted says:

First we’ll have an orgy, then we’ll go see Tony Bennett.

After Bob finds Carol’s tennis coach in the bedroom, Bob sits on the bed and tells Horst that it’s okay, that he isn’t going to hit him or anything. To which a relieved Horst replies with wonderful understatement:

You are one hell of a guy.

In 1978, Mazursky continued with An Unmarried Woman. Jill Clayburgh is going through a tough divorce. Cliff Gorman tells Clayburgh:

Work, food, sex...that’s the whole ball game.

Gorman is a jerk in the movie, but Clayburgh has sex with him anyway as she tries to get in touch with her sexuality. (Alan Bates is also happy to help her along this journey.)

The sexual maturity of the United States has devolved (really...even the Puritans believed in the God-given pleasure of sex within marriage) into a giggling 13-year-old, best exemplified by the Janet Jackson incident at the 2004 Super Bowl. U.S. Representative Heather Wilson cried, literally, that her 12-year-old son was traumatized by the blip of Janet’s breast. Within 12 hours the FCC ordered an investigation of nipplegate; within 10 days there was a Congressional hearing.

(In contrast, a year after the 9/11 tragedy Congress was still sitting on its collective hands. Thanks to the persistence of the Jersey Girls—Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, and Mindy Kleinberg—and the rest of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, an independent commission was established and Congressional hearings finally commenced.)

In the U.S., the FCC received more than 200,000 complaints regarding the wardrobe malfunction; the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council received 50 complaints. Granted, Canadians are usually more interested in the Grey Cup championship. Nonetheless, that’s 50 complaints out of a few million Super Bowl viewers in Canada.

And by the way, none of the 90 million U.S. viewers saw Janet Jackson’s nipple. They saw Jackson’s right breast for a half second, and possibly a glimpse of her areola: her nipple was covered by a pasty. What is it about the nipple and the areola that is so dirty? In recent years, mainstream American magazines have shown women in various poses of dishabille or total nudity—legs, hips, full breast from the side-- but the nipple and areola remain taboo, always covered.

America’s preoccupation with breasts is hilariously described by Terry Thomas as Col. J. Algernon Hawthorne (Lt. Colonel actually) in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Thanks to William and Tania Rose and IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, for Thomas’s rant below—

And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this wretched Godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything? I'll wager you anything you like that if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight!

Erotic Love

[True erotic] love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence...if each one experiences himself from the center of his existence.-- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Sexual love—what Fromm calls erotic love—is love for one person; union with another person not just in body, but complete fusion in body, mind and spirit. (He is not referring to simply having sex with someone, which happens all the time without love.) As opposed to brotherly love, by its very nature erotic love is exclusive to one person. Perhaps the most important thing in erotic love is to love from the essence of your being...to experience the other person in the essence of his or her being.

The danger of the past was that men became slaves; the danger of the future is that man may become robots.—Erich Fromm

In the fast-paced world of today’s society—when thinking fast, talking fast, doing fast is at a premium—few people are in touch with their bodies. We ratchet up our ass and go into work mode every morning: at work we are in a state of constant vigilance. A mechanical human being is the result. (In 1927, Fritz Lang expressed this concern in his classic silent film Metropolis.) We come home from work and try to de-stress by having a beer, a glass of wine, or, depending on where you live, a joint.

The primary reason that America is a sexually frustrated nation is best described by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse--

Most people have concentrated sexual pleasure into the genitals, which removes pleasure from the rest of the body. Concentrating pleasure into narrow erogenous zones leads to the production of a shallow, dehumanized, one-dimensional person.—Eros and Civilization

At the expense of the rest of our body, we focus on the genitals because of our increasing need for instant gratification, or because of a lack of physical nurturing in childhood, or because we’ve replaced our authentic selves with a mechanical work persona— or a combination of factors. We’ve become desensitized to the pleasures of the rest of the body; we’ve lost our capacity for intimacy—not only in the bedroom, but in our day-to-day living. The lack of intimacy is reflected in the small amount of time we spend on foreplay. Our sexuality is no longer a part of our total being, but is found primarily in our genitals. Now the goal is an intense genital orgasm.

In addition, foreplay is seldom performed for the fun and affection it brings to the relationship. When it is performed, it’s rather mechanical and solely to prepare the other person for an orgasm. Ironically, foreplay for the sake of foreplay usually results in a more satisfying orgasm, and sex becomes an experience that enriches one’s body and soul.

The dysfunctional state of sex in modern society was demonstrated in 1987 in the movie Baby Boom. When Harold Ramis and Diane Keaton decide to have sex, the time on the clock beside their bed is 9:30. In the next scene they’re sitting up in bed reading, and the clock reads 9:40.

"The most passionate kissing is totally dispassionate.—Anonymous

Sex should be enriching and liberating, but because of the lack of foreplay and intimacy sex leaves most people effete, wasted and unsatisfied. A clue to enriching, satisfying sex can be found in—of all places—the actions of an alien from outer space, one Valentine Michael Smith. In Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land--

Men don’t give kissing their whole attention. No matter how hard they try, parts of their minds are on something else. ... But when Mike kisses you he isn’t doing anything else. You’re his whole universe, and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing you.— Anne, speaking of the alien.

Mouth-to-mouth kissing is such an important part of affectionate foreplay. Between people who love each other erotically, kissing is one of the most intimate activities. Yet many adult lovers don’t enjoy kissing, precisely because it is so intimate. In movies involving prostitutes, you notice that one of the rules is no kissing. The last thing a prostitute desires is to be intimate when having sex with a stranger. Interestingly, a penis inside a vagina can be one of the least intimate of sexual activities.

One of the most common obstacles to full, enriching sexual pleasure is the inability to totally relax, the inability to shut down the cognitive left brain and just ‘go with the flow.’ —Anonymous

Chapter 2

MOTHERS Who Love Us

God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.— Abraham Lincoln

Is there anything in the world more important than a mother’s unconditional love for her child? A loving mother instills in her children a love for life: it’s not just okay to be alive...it’s great to be alive! A happy mother’s love for life is as infectious to the child as the anxiety of a neurotic, unhappy mother. Both attitudes