Quote synopsis

Two Territories

Mary Pickford — "Queen of the Movies" · Co-founder of United Artists, 1919 · Academy Award for Best Actress, 1929 · Public domain

"The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power." — Mary Pickford

The quote divides time into its two available territories and assigns each its proper value. The past is closed. No amount of regret, analysis, or rumination will alter a single moment of it; the energy spent there is spent for nothing. The future, by contrast, is entirely open, entirely unmade, and entirely susceptible to the choices made right now. The word "yet" is doing careful work in the second sentence — not "still" in your power, not "maybe" in your power. "Yet" carries the sense of "it remains": a fact that is true in this moment, waiting to be acted on.

Pickford was not writing from comfort. Gladys Louise Smith was born in Toronto in 1892 and became the family's primary breadwinner at seven years old after her father died. She brought her younger siblings to the stage with her, made it to Broadway by 1907, and entered film in 1909. By 1916 she was earning ten thousand dollars a week plus a share of profits — an unprecedented sum — and had become Hollywood's first millionaire. She understood, from the very beginning of her working life, that the past offered no refunds. The future was the only account worth drawing from.

What distinguished Pickford from her contemporaries was not just her talent in front of the camera but her relentless drive behind it. In 1919, dissatisfied with the control studios held over performers, she co-founded United Artists alongside Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks — giving actors a means of owning and distributing their own work. She was one of the thirty-six founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927. In 1929 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her first talking picture, Coquette — the second such award ever presented — a transition that required her to abandon the silent-era persona that had made her famous and reinvent herself entirely. She received an Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1976. The quote looks forward. It was what she always did.

What would change if you stopped spending energy on the closed territory — and put it all into the open one?