okay so a friend of mine shared this bizarre twitter ad spam to laugh at; something about the phrasing of the quote struck me as odd, so I immediately suspected that Nicole Kidman had never actually said it. searching for it on google revealed a couple hundred sites citing it without any further attribution, plus a single reference which cited any other information — goodreads, which attributed it to her in "To the Lighthouse."
what's "To the Lighthouse?" a Virginia Woolf book she narrated an Audible audiobook version of. (searching the text of the book, naturally, reveals no matches.)
even more questionable? her other quotes supposedly from this same work, including
I have my natural blonde eyebrows darkened.
I always wanted to get married with just candles! I think candlelight is the most beautiful light there is and there's something very spiritual about it.
I wore a merkin for my full frontal scene in Billy Bathgate.
no real moral to this except "the internet is a weird place completely full of incredibly fake information."
So, last year, I had the young folks that I work with submit quotes for a project and ended up doing some deep dives trying to find sources for them. Many were either attributed to the wrong person, EXTREMELY paraphrased, or both. This breakdown of a mutated quote on (the charmingly singularly-focused website) QuoteInvestigator doesn't even mention that it is now frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, and has become about creativity instead of research, which doesn't even make particular sense to attribute to Einstein ("Einstein said this" is always an immediate red flag).
Anyway, I thought these Kidman quotes must be based on something, so I looked into them. Search results for the Billy Bathgate thing got absolutely toxic fast, so I'm dissuaded from trying too hard on that one. I couldn't find a good match for the quote about the candles, though her 2006 wedding to Keith Urban was indeed all-candlelight, so there may have been some version of it published somewhere, any link to it now long-rotted! She mentions having her eyebrows (and eyelashes) tinted in this interview, but it's not even close to the same wording, so I'm inclined to believe she's mentioned it before and the original is also too old to find online. And I think.. I think... the quote about life's twists and turns MUST be a rewording of this Vanity Fair interview:
"It was just another twist in my life: Here it goes. Hold on, and off we go!"
What she says directly after that is, "But it was painful, deeply painful. We were in a very, very, very bad, painful place, and have managed to step through it, and I hope that gives some people some hope who may be in the same place. And that’s enough said. Anything else is overindulgent and unnecessary right now."
...because it's a quote about being in a relationship with someone going through rehab! It is a very specific, emotionally guarded quote that has been shifted into something broad and digestible so that deepfake versions of her can proclaim it on "hustle life inspirational" youtube channels (not an invented example; literally found a deepfake of her saying the more popular version).
I wish I had a succinct or helpful conclusion, but I'm mostly just a fae-like creature who will compulsively try to solve little puzzles such as finding the source of a weird quote. I guess: if a quote feels off, try to find the source! And also: if a quote doesn't feel off, if it feels true and moving, but doesn't include a source, try to find the source! Even if deepfakes get really good and you can watch someone saying something with what you are forced to assume is their own mouth, try to find out when, where, and about what it was said. People don't say quotes; they have conversations, they make speeches, they write essays, they do interviews. The things that they say have context. Which, of course, is harder to find, but also harder to fake.
