Top 70 Gene Tierney Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.”

— Gene Tierney

2. “A flame burns brightest just before it goes out.”

— Gene Tierney

3. “Where there is hope, there is no despair.”

— Gene Tierney

4. “I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.”

— Gene Tierney

5. “I simply did not want my face to be my talent.”

— Gene Tierney

6. “It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.”

— Gene Tierney

7. “Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.”

— Gene Tierney

8. “I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.”

— Gene Tierney

9. “I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.”

— Gene Tierney

10. “The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.”

— Gene Tierney

11. “Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.”

— Gene Tierney

12. “Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.”

— Gene Tierney

13. “When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.”

— Gene Tierney

14. “When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.”

— Gene Tierney

15. “Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.”

— Gene Tierney

16. “Nothing strengthens a woman’s determination to be in love quite so much as being told that she cannot.”

— Gene Tierney

17. “A romantic, I think, picks the rose and is careless with the thorn.”

— Gene Tierney

18. “The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.”

— Gene Tierney

19. “I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood’s rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.”

— Gene Tierney

20. “Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.”

— Gene Tierney

21. “As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.”

— Gene Tierney

22. “My parents argued more than I remembered, about money and all the little things that disguise the truth that you are still arguing about money.”

— Gene Tierney

23. “I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.”

— Gene Tierney

24. “The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.”

— Gene Tierney

25. “When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let’s Pretend, it’s often easy to see symbolism where none exists.”

— Gene Tierney

26. “Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.”

— Gene Tierney

27. “Joe Schenck, a top 20th Century-Fox executive, once said to me that he really believed I had a future, and that was because I was the only girl who could survive so many bad pictures.”

— Gene Tierney

28. “Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.”

— Gene Tierney

29. “Children don’t understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.”

— Gene Tierney

30. “My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.”

— Gene Tierney

31. “I’m not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy’s charm, but he took life just as it came.”

— Gene Tierney

32. “Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.”

— Gene Tierney

33. “I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.”

— Gene Tierney

34. “In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother’s distress.”

— Gene Tierney

35. “I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.”

— Gene Tierney

36. “Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.”

— Gene Tierney

37. “I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.”

— Gene Tierney

38. “I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?”

— Gene Tierney

39. “Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.”

— Gene Tierney

40. “I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.”

— Gene Tierney

41. “I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.”

— Gene Tierney

42. “Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.”

— Gene Tierney

43. “I existed in a world that never is – the prison of the mind.”

— Gene Tierney

44. “I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.”

— Gene Tierney

45. “In show business the saying seems too often true: it isn’t enough to succeed; someone else must fail.”

— Gene Tierney

46. “I never understood the theory, once popular among doctors, that blamed mental disorders on too little or too much mother love. My own mother was my darling.”

— Gene Tierney

47. “In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.”

— Gene Tierney

48. “I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.”

— Gene Tierney

49. “I used up every cent I earned as an actress.”

— Gene Tierney

50. “I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.”

— Gene Tierney