When I look around the world, I don't see too many damsels in distress. If they're a damsel in distress, they're manipulating some guy to help them.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that women often portray themselves as needing help to manipulate others into action.
Sigourney Weaver's quote reflects a critical observation on the traditional trope of 'damsels in distress.' It implies that, rather than being passive victims, many women are active agents who use their situations to influence and manipulate those around them, especially men, into providing assistance, thus challenging the stereotype of helplessness.
In practice
Discussing the representation of women in movies at a film festival.
I've always thought that a lot of the problems in the world would be solved if a spaceship did arrive, then anyone with one head and two arms and two legs would be your brother! It wouldn't matter where they were from or what they believed or anything. It might be good for us.
Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
Please, God, please, don't let me be normal!
Most of life is hell. It’s filed with failure and loss. People disappoint you. Dreams don’t work out. Hearts get broken. Innocent journalists die. And the best moments of life, when everything comes together, are few and fleeting. But you’ll never get to the next great moment if you don’t keep going. So that’s what I do. I keep going.
I never think about Wall Street - why should I - but to go down there so often while filming 'Working Girl,' to become acquainted with this whole different world, and to find out what goes on behind the scenes is so interesting. There's so much of the city that you don't really bother to investigate. Ahh... New York.
Once I put that wig on, I didn't say an intelligent thing for four months. My voice went up. I walked differently. I'd ask incredibly stupid questions.
I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.
You know someone is your favorite person when you've done a day of press, listened to yourself ad nauseam, listened to them tell every story, and when it ends, it's like, 'Are we going to eat something?'
A relationship is more of an assignment than a choice. We can walk away from the assignment, but we cannot walk away from the lessons it presents. We stay with a relationship until a lesson is learned, or we simply learn it another way.
Your only real choices are to open fully and receive their gifts or crucify them and be relieved of their force...But you must be willing to feel your heart's terrors and wounds or else you will close and protect yourself, striking back at the source of openness you most yearn to become.
A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
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