Daily Inspiration Quote by Marisa Tomei

Tomei’s line lands because it refuses nostalgia. It yanks the lace curtain off the so-called “brilliant” eras that get packaged as tasteful period pieces: the art, the manners, the salons. Her Oscar Wilde reference is doing double work. Wilde is a shorthand for glamorized genius, but also for a legal and social trap that turned queerness into evidence. By saying “a man like Wilde,” she points to the cruel paradox: even exceptional status couldn’t buy real safety. Fame didn’t equal freedom; it just made you a more visible target.

The second clause pivots from the iconic to the ordinary, and that’s the quiet punch. Wilde’s tragedy is widely remembered; women’s daily containment is treated like atmosphere. Tomei collapses those stories into the same architecture of repression: a culture that policed desire and controlled who got to speak. Her phrasing, “women in general,” is broad on purpose, pushing back against the way history isolates a few “exceptional” women while ignoring the systemic silence that made exception necessary.

The language is blunt, almost contemporary (“out of the closet”), and that anachronism is strategic. It drags the past into the moral vocabulary of the present, reminding us that oppression wasn’t just “different norms,” it was enforced disappearance. The subtext: we still sentimentalize eras that would have erased many of us, and we still treat voice and sexuality as privileges granted, not rights assumed.