Quoted in Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, p 54.
Virginia Charters (1773)
2001
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 318.
Speech given by Mussolini to a group of Milanese Fascist veterans (October 14, 1944), quoted in Revolutionary Fascism, Erik Norling, Lisbon, Finis Mundi Press (2011) pp.119-120.
1940s
“All of us wish we had an Alice. I wish I had an Alice.”
(Referring to her character on The Brady Bunch) in People magazine in 1992
Part X, ch. 51 (Sylvia Barrett)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)
Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 208
Context: The wild winds had been sown and the whirlwinds were gathering... and I was reaping what I had not sown... None of us could escape the history of the centuries before any of us had been born, and with which we had nothing to do. We had not, I think, ever committed even a mild unkindness against a Chinese, and certainly we had devoted ourselves to justice for them, we had taken sides against our own race again and again for their sakes, sensitive always to injustices which others had committed and were still committing. But nothing mattered today, neither the kindness nor the cruelty. We were in hiding for our lives because we were white.
“There is no me. I do not exist … There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.”
As "Himself" in The Muppet Show, episode # 2.19 (6 December 1977); also quoted in "Sellers Strikes Again"by Richard Schickel in TIME magazine (3 March 1980) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,950308,00.html?iid=chix-sphere
Variants:
There used to be a me behind the mask, but I had it surgically removed.
As quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (1988) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 622
“I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it.”
Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 6
Context: I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it. Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
