Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Meryl Streep, born Mary Louise Streep

American Film Actress of Theater, Television and Film

"We are the choices we have made."

"The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other."

"Being a celebrity has taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul."

"Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials."

"Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too."

"There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation."

"Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time."

"We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group."

"While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world."

"I have a theory that movies operate on the level of dreams, where you dream yourself."

"Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there."

"You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you."

"I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you."