Daily Inspiration Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

"I'm as pure as the driven slush" is Tallulah Bankhead doing what she did best: turning scandal into a punchline and the punchline into armor. The line riffs on the old cliche "pure as the driven snow", then drags it through the gutter with a single word swap. "Slush" is snow that has been trampled, salted, and mixed with city grime - not accidental impurity, but impurity produced by traffic, nightlife, and consequence. Bankhead isn't pleading innocence; she's mocking the very idea that anyone is owed it.

The specific intent is preemptive defiance. At a time when actresses were expected to sell a carefully managed image of virtue, Bankhead flips the moral ledger. She confesses without confessing, suggesting that "purity" is less a personal condition than a social costume, and she's refusing the wardrobe. The joke lands because it weaponizes understatement: she doesn't say "I'm wicked", she says she's "slush", a word that implies mess, pleasure, and public visibility. You're supposed to picture not pastoral whiteness but a street corner after midnight.

Context matters: Bankhead's fame was inseparable from her appetite for attention, her openly louche persona, her cultivated reputation for drinking, sex, and cutting one-liners. Hollywood and Broadway ran on censorship, gossip columns, and double standards; she survived by controlling the narrative through wit. The subtext is simple and modern: if you're going to police me, at least admit the rules are dirty too.