Elizabeth Taylor > Quotes

“It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses

“A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“Now is the time for guts and guile”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“the problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure there going to have some pretty annoying virtues”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“You might as well live”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“The most sensible thing to do to people you hate is to drink their brandy.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A View Of The Harbour

“The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“When the sun comes up, I have morals again.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“Its best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this...a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Wreath of Roses

“If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“There's no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. After years of building up each unique personality, in the end there is no moment of putting lines beneath the sum and adding up to see what it all amounts too.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A View Of The Harbour

“All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Angel

“She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.

If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A View Of The Harbour

“...pensaba en el amor y en sus espantosas desigualdades. Siempre hay alguien que ofrece la mejilla y otro que la besa.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“You hang on because you realize that everything fades away; everything passes. You can survive anything if you choose to do so. Beauty fades, so don't take it seriously. It's the bowl of candy someone left behind. You pounce on it too often and you pay the price, but it was heaven for a minute or two. Fame is a bit of perfume coasting on the air. Sniff deeply and walk on. What lasts is friendship, partnerships of the soul that keep you focused and strong and in your place. I now long for times with friends--evenings that don't require denial, a pill, or a girdle. Just my heart, my time, and a rich history." Elizabeth Taylor/Interview with James Grissom/1991 #FolliesOfGod”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Now – by omission – she was trying to get away with what she thought of as a whopper, and she wondered if either she or Ludo would be equal to it. He had seemed ready enough to fall in with her; had had no scruples as she herself had; had thought it all rather a lark. She had tracked him down in Harrods Banking Hall.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“The dead belonged to her as no one living could have done.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Angel

“The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“One is left so much on one’s own. People are shy of the bereaved. They don’t quite know what to be.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we report to work.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“La señora Palfrey durmió plácidamente y toda la noche, con los labios ligeramente estirados, como si estuviese a punto de sonreír.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Prohibido morir aquí

“None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food; but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont