Daily Inspiration Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

“Hag-ridden” is a deliciously cruel image: ambition not as a sleek engine of success, but as a shrieking parasite squatting on your chest. Bankhead, a performer who built a public identity out of excess and nerve, flips the usual American script where wanting more is framed as moral hygiene. Her line lands because it’s not a humblebrag or a coy confession; it’s a complaint with teeth, the kind that only makes sense from someone who’s watched desire turn into a full-time warden.

The intent is blunt self-diagnosis. Ambition, in her telling, isn’t a ladder you climb, it’s a haunting. That’s the subtext: the industry doesn’t merely reward hunger, it industrializes it. For an actress in the early-to-mid 20th century, ambition carried a particular double bind. You needed it to be taken seriously, yet a woman showing too much appetite could be branded vulgar, predatory, “difficult” - a social punishment that Bankhead, famously undomestic, would have understood intimately. So the wish “to be free” isn’t laziness; it’s a fantasy of silence, of living without the constant inner audition.

There’s also a sly theatricality in the phrasing: she performs the exhaustion of performing. Bankhead makes a taboo admission sound glamorous and grim at once, exposing the emotional cost of a culture that treats striving as personality. The real punchline is that even her escape wish is ambitious: she wants mastery over wanting.