Daily Inspiration Quote by Hattie McDaniel

A clean little joke with a bruised edge: McDaniel frames marriage as something you can simply be "done with", like a role you’ve played too many times and don’t care to reprise. The line lands because it moves fast - "loathe" signals a hard-won aversion, then she undercuts any invitation to pry with a curt tally ("enough") and a final act of self-protection ("prefer to forget it"). It’s comedy as boundary-setting.

The specific intent reads as refusal: she’s swatting away the cultural expectation that a successful woman should be heading toward her "next" marriage, her next romantic chapter, her next acceptable kind of happiness. Instead, she claims the right to opt out. The subtext is sharper: marriage isn’t being remembered as companionship or stability, but as labor, disappointment, or constraint - something that costs more than it gives. "Prefer" is doing quiet work here, suggesting forgetting isn’t effortless; it’s a chosen strategy for staying intact.

Context matters. McDaniel’s fame came inside an industry that limited Black actresses to degrading caricatures while scrutinizing their private lives for respectability. For a woman navigating Hollywood’s racism, precarious opportunity, and constant public appraisal, marriage could be less refuge than another arena where control slips away. The line performs a kind of autonomy that wasn’t easily granted to her elsewhere: if the world insists on scripting you, you learn to cut scenes.