"When life knocks you to your knees, and it will, why, get up! If it knocks you to your knees again, as it will, well, isn't that the best position from which to pray?"
About this Quote
Barrymore’s line turns a bruising truism into stagecraft: the fall is guaranteed, the recovery is a choice, and the punchline is that grace can be found in the very posture of defeat. The opening cadence is practically vaudeville-propulsive, with that brisk “and it will” repeated like a drummer keeping time. She’s not selling optimism so much as control of the frame. Life may knock you down, but you get to decide what the kneeling means.
The subtext is a distinctly actorly kind of resilience. Barrymore came up in an era when performance meant endurance: touring circuits, brutal reviews, gossip columns, family dynasty pressure, and the quiet costs of being a woman whose public face had to stay luminous. “Get up!” sounds like backstage grit, the old-school discipline of hitting your mark no matter what’s happening in your body or private life. Then she pivots to prayer, not as piety-for-show but as a sly reclassification of vulnerability. Knees on the floor can read as humiliation; she insists they can also be agency, an intentional act of reaching outward.
Context matters: early-20th-century America was steeped in public religion, but also in self-help stoicism. Barrymore stitches them together without sermonizing. The joke is gentle, not cynical, yet it has bite: suffering doesn’t get redeemed by pretending it’s noble; it gets repurposed by giving it a use. The line works because it offers a practical move - stand up - and a psychological one - if you can’t, reinterpret the moment so it doesn’t own you.
The subtext is a distinctly actorly kind of resilience. Barrymore came up in an era when performance meant endurance: touring circuits, brutal reviews, gossip columns, family dynasty pressure, and the quiet costs of being a woman whose public face had to stay luminous. “Get up!” sounds like backstage grit, the old-school discipline of hitting your mark no matter what’s happening in your body or private life. Then she pivots to prayer, not as piety-for-show but as a sly reclassification of vulnerability. Knees on the floor can read as humiliation; she insists they can also be agency, an intentional act of reaching outward.
Context matters: early-20th-century America was steeped in public religion, but also in self-help stoicism. Barrymore stitches them together without sermonizing. The joke is gentle, not cynical, yet it has bite: suffering doesn’t get redeemed by pretending it’s noble; it gets repurposed by giving it a use. The line works because it offers a practical move - stand up - and a psychological one - if you can’t, reinterpret the moment so it doesn’t own you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
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