Elizabeth Eliot > Quotes

“My mother, although she had in a great part shifted the responsibility for me, tried all the same quite hard to do her duty by me. She would from time to time take me on visits to such of her friends as happened also to be afflicted with children.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“You see,’ Alice was very earnest, ‘if we’d lived in the slums and our mother had had fifteen children, and our father had got drunk and knocked us about, we should have been brought up against “real life.”’ ‘Daddy does drink—a bit.’ Anthony was hopeful. ‘It’s what makes him do card tricks after dinner.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Geoffrey told us that he had been to a psycho-analyst. As a patient? We felt awkward and impressed; perhaps he was a lunatic, or perhaps he suffered in some of the same ways as the people in the case histories at the back of the book. We looked at him speculatively but didn’t like to ask.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“. . . and I had a cocktail,’ Alice said. I was impressed, and asked her if she had enjoyed it. ‘Well, truthfully, not very much,’ Alice admitted. ‘But we shall have to get used to them, you know.’ We both agreed about drinking being one of the things you had to do when you were grown up. Fortunately we already enjoyed smoking, so we wouldn’t have to bother about that.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“She comes to tea with me at Gunter’s, just as usual, but our conversations are impersonal. Only she told me the other day that she was afraid the world would stop floating.’ ‘That’s Miss White,’ I said. ‘She’s my grandmother’s maid. When she used to cross the Atlantic she was always afraid that the liner would stop floating and sink to the bottom. Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn’t had suddenly altered.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I started to wander aimlessly about the house. Human nature was horrible, people altogether were horrible. I couldn’t be bothered with them. I was disenchanted with the world.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Uncle Henry said he believed he had once seen the Judge at a levee and asked Cassius if he too was at the Bar. ‘No,’ said Cassius. ‘No, I do nothing at all.’ ‘Nothing?’ Uncle Henry, who had done nothing during the whole of his life, sounded shocked. ‘Nothing,’ Cassius repeated. He implied that it was enough that he should exist.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Obviously that wasn’t how she thought of herself. She sought to do neither harm nor good. She was detached, intellectual and artistic. She read American books which had been banned in England and English books which had been banned in America.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Later the same afternoon she might try to explain Dunne’s Experiment with Time to me.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“At luncheon I was relieved to see that Lady Guthrie had, for the time being anyhow, apparently decided to drop the role, she had threatened to assume earlier, of the always ailing mother. She was now talking away with great animation and some wit. If a role was involved it was clearly that of a sister anxious to appear to advantage in the eyes of a brother whom she greatly admired.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Cecil

“Tonight, with seven people to be provided with tea, there was not much choice. It was this scarcity of the most ordinary kind of equipment which had surprised me on first coming to live with Stephanie. I could understand that china got broken, and that silver was liable to get dents in it and become scratched; what I could not understand was the china not having been nice in the first place, and the silver not having been silver. I decided that these things were a mark of a superior mind.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“No, she isn’t dead.’ Mrs Corwell was aware that the dramatic quality of her announcement had been largely spoiled. ‘Then that’s all right.’ Mother smiled reassuringly. It seemed that she had only wanted to know if she was to add ‘Call at undertaker’s,’ to the bottom of her list.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“She smiled at him, but he was occupied in helping Charles with his arithmetic, and didn’t notice her. It’s going to be all right, Laura thought. We shall start all over again and it will be all right. I shall be exactly like everyone else and we shall be very happy together.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“Your mother had a very difficult time with your father. Your mother is a very remarkable woman. Your mother is hell.’ I was being absurd. At my age it didn’t matter what one’s mother was like; one had finished with that relationship.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Oh, but surely,’ Henry said. ‘We’ve got a lot of things to arrange, and it doesn’t do any good to worry about money, you know, and we’ve got heaps for the time being.’ Pamela didn’t say anything. Perhaps she was regretting the two hundred pounds she had given to ‘that woman.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“I was rather fond of the admirals. They’d been our great-grandfathers and -uncles; and they’d all got a piece of sea and a ship in the background. Henry said that he’d often thought how lucky it was that they’d all been painted by such terrible artists; because if any of the pictures had been valuable they’d have had to be sold. ‘Aren’t any of them worth anything?”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“He isn’t really unkind,’ Laura thought, and he has a great deal to put up with; and then she thought how nice it would have been if Edward had said he was sorry for having made her cry, and for having seemed so unkind. But Edward never did say he was sorry; why should he, when he was never in the wrong?”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“When Alice was eighteen and I was seventeen and a half we ‘came out.’ Alice’s family took a furnished house in Cadogan Gardens from which Mrs. Norton and Alice were to operate. Our campaign was conducted from Hill Street. Looking back on it, the whole business was an incredible performance. The basic idea was rational enough. When a girl reached marriageable age, she was introduced by her parents into adult society, where it was hoped she would meet her future husband.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I was getting into a rut and I was not contented. I tried to look at mother and Sophia with understanding and sympathy. I tried to understand their moods. I tried to be adult about them. It was no good. Mother and Sophia irritated me.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Mrs Martell was thinking about herself, and also about her cousin Laura’s husband Edward West. It was rather wonderful about Edward, but how would it ever end? Laura, of course, must never guess, never be told. But was there really so much to tell? Cathie Martell could wish that there were more, but, so far, Edward had insisted upon being faithful to his wife.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“The Principal, Miss Hartley-Jones, said that she would be very pleased to have me as a pupil, and that she was sure I would be very happy with them. She mentioned that of course all her pupils were gentlewomen. I was beginning to wonder where really common people learned to type. Maybe they just picked it up for themselves.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I hoped that when he did meet him Gerald really would find that Henry was charming or, at any rate, interesting. Of course, Henry was a human being and human beings were always interesting. People were quite different. They overcrowded the buses and they created queues.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“To live in the world as not of the world,’ Alice said. ‘That always sounded so nice, as if one had a little world of one’s own floating about inside the big one.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I had smiled sheepishly and not known what to say. A fiancé’s sister is a difficult character to know what to do with. She is a future sister-in-law and therefore a potential source of trouble. At the same time she is the representative, anyhow, for the time being, of the fiancé’s family. It is up to her to welcome friends and relations from the opposing camp.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“Stage one: the man was completely bowled over by her beauty and sensibility, ‘you are quite lovely, but it’s your mind I like’ (any man who was not completely bowled over was never considered at all). Stage two: the man took Cathie to endless dinners, theatres and drives into the country, love play was intermingled with long interesting talks about literature and things of the spirit. Stage three: the man got sick of it.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“I’m afraid,’ Mrs Martell said, ‘that I have no comment to make.’—That was the correct way to speak to the press, it was the phrase Mrs Martell’s mother had used over and over again, when Mrs Martell’s father had behaved so wrongly in the early nineteen-twenties. As it so happened Mrs Martell had had nothing to do with the murder which had occurred in the antique shop downstairs, that is to say, she had not committed it herself and had not been an accessory of the young criminal who had. All the same, nice people do not like to have their names in the papers, except in the obituary columns.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“Mrs Martell picked up the Daily Telegraph again. Ruth withdrew to the kitchen. Mrs Martell lit a cigarette. She knew it was rather naughty of her; cigarette smoke, especially in the morning, was death to the complexion; all the same, she would smoke just one cigarette, and then she would do her exercises.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Mrs. Martell

“One was rather sorry for Eric. He sat in one of Pamela’s orange armchairs and he looked solid and reliable. One supposed him to be getting on for fifty. He wore a dark blue suit, he was going a little bald, he was an historian. He didn’t look at all the sort of man who had to travel about with a private psychiatrist.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry

“A great many subjects were touched on and left hanging in the air. I believe, although I do not know if she knew it herself, that she had evolved this oblique method of approach as a form of protection. If she said enough things how was anyone to know which one was really on her mind? And her auditor could thereby be induced to give his or her opinion on something without ever knowing whether or not it was important to her.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Cecil

“He had been dramatic when, as a very small child on his first visit to London, he and mother had lost sight of each other for a few moments in Harrod’s Stores. Henry had rushed screaming up to the nearest saleswoman and told her that his mother had been kidnapped.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Henry