Dorothy Gilman > Quotes

“In the morning when Mrs. Pollifax awoke she realized at once that a fateful day was beginning. She lay and thought about this dispassionately, almost wonderingly, because to every life there eventually came a moment when one had to accept the fact that the shape, the pattern, the direction of the future was entirely out of one's hands, to be decided unalterably by chance, by fate or by God. There was nothing to do but accept, and from this to proceed, doing the very best that could be done.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“Once upon a time, [the guru] said, when God had finished making the world, he wanted to leave behind Him for man a piece of His own divinity, a spark of His essence, a promise to man of what he could become, with effort. He looked for a place to hide this Godhead because, he explained, what man could find too easily would never be valued by him.
"Then you must hide the Godhead on the highest mountain peak on earth," said one of His councilors.
God shook His head. "No, for man is an adventuresome creature and he will soon enough learn to climb the highest mountain peaks."
"Hide it then, O Great One, in the depths of the earth!"
"I think not," said God, "for man will one day discover that he can dig into the deepest parts of the earth."
"In the middle of the ocean then, Master?"
God shook His head. "I've given man a brain, you see, and one day he'll learn to build ships and cross the mightiest oceans."
"Where then, Master?" cried His councilors.
God smiled. "I'll hide it in the most inaccessible place of all, and the one place that man will never think to look for it. I'll hide it deep inside of man himself.”
― Dorothy Gilman, A Nun in the Closet

“I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Incident at Badamya

“If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“You haven't been planting seeds of insurrection, have you, Duchess?"
"Well, it's a change from planting geraniums," she retorted.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more?”
― Dorothy Gilman

“...why doesn't anything end happily?"
"Because," said Mrs. Pollifax slowly, "there are no happy endings, Jenny, there are only happy people.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

“She drew herself up to her full height—it was a little difficult on a donkey—and said primly, “I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath!”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality,”
― Dorothy Gilman

“Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity--births, widowhood, illnesses--and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well.”
― Dorothy Gilman

“he appeared to be struggling with something trapped in his throat; it turned out to be a word. "thanks," he said.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Clairvoyant Countess

“Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all...Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.”
― Dorothy Gilman

“the problems changed, but people were the same”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

“there are no happy endings, Jenny, there are only happy people.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

“I've have grown a night-blooming cereus on my fire escape," she added almost shyly.

He said quietly, "This is important. Why?"

She hesitated. "Because lately I've had the feeling we rush toward something-some kind of Armageddon-set into motion long ago. There are so many people in the world, and so much destructiveness. I was astonished when I first heard that a night-blooming cereus blooms only once a year, and always at midnight. It implies such intelligence somewhere.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

“I mean, have you ever stopped to realize - not just the miracle that life is - but how basically comic it is despite its griefs? The wonder of it, as Amman Singh says, is that we take it so seriously. One day, poised on my tightrope, I hope to manage a glorious cartwheel, or at the very least a pirouette.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Tightrope Walker

“A pity, she thought, that taking a stand on moral issues had to prove so lonely these days,”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax on Safari

“But this was exactly the age, she thought, when life ought to be spent, not hoarded. There had been enough years of comfortable living, and complacency was nothing but delusion. One could not always change the world, she felt, but one could change oneself.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

“That’s what terrorism is, basically—pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha

“It wasn’t that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“I have a flexible mind—I believe it’s one of the advantages of growing old,” she explained. “I find youth quite rigid at times.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax

“Everything is a matter of choice, and when we choose are we not gambling on the unknown and its being a wise choice?And isn't it free choice that makes individuals of us? We are eternally free to choose ourselves and our futures. I believe myself that life is quite comparable to a map like this a constant choice of direction and route.”
― Dorothy Gilman

“But a certain perspective is needed about tragedies, Betsy, for they happen to nearly everyone. Eventually you have to learn, try to learn, that it’s the eternal things that matter, and among them courage.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Kaleidoscope

“make sense out of a world that could produce trips to the moon and silicon chips and computer robots and satellites, yet never touch the impoverished hearts that could still torture, terrorize and kill without mercy or feeling.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax and the Hong Kong Buddha

“What continues to astonish me
about a garden
is that you can walk past it in a hurry,
see something wrong,
stop to set it right,
and emerge an hour or two later
breathless, centered,
and wondering what on earth happened.”
― Dorothy Gilman

“The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Tightrope Walker

“from Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat:
"Set not thy heart on any good or gain, Life means but pleasure, or means but pain; when Time lets slip a little perfect hour, O take it - for it will not come again.”
― Dorothy Gilman, Caravan

“There was nothing rational about a wall, whether it encircled Berlin, San Quentin or the ghettos of Warsaw. A wall was a symbol, fortified as much by the idea behind it as by bricks and guns.”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax

“there was no safety anywhere in life, except as illusion”
― Dorothy Gilman, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax

“She wondered what archaeologists in the year A.D. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or only vestiges of folly and violence?”
― Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station