Lillian Hellman > Quotes

“People change and forget to tell each other.”
― Lillian Hellman

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
― Lillian Hellman

“It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.”
― Lillian Hellman

“I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.”
― Lillian Hellman

“It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.”
― Lillian Hellman

“I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.”
― Lillian Hellman, The Children's Hour

“If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”
― Lillian Hellman, Pentimento

“Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
― Lillian Hellman

“My father was often angry when I was most like him.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.”
― Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes

“Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.”
― Lillian Hellman

“As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“Most people coming out of a war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes, for a time, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“Mengejek adalah cara yang sangat tidak menyenangkan untuk menyatakan kebenaran.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will how through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter "repented," changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.”
― Lillian Hellman

“But then everybody who has been in the Soviet Union for any length of time has noticed their concern with the United States: we may be the enemy, but we are the admired enemy, and the so-called good life for us is the to-be-good life for them. During the war, the Russian combination of dislike and grudging admiration for us, and ours for them, seemed to me like the innocent rivalry of two men proud of being large, handsome and successful. But I was wrong. They have chosen to imitate and compete with the most vulgar aspects of American life, and we have chosen, as in the revelations of the CIA bribery of intellectuals and scholars, to say, "But the Russians do the same thing," as if honor were a mask that you put on and took off at a costume ball. They condemn Vietnam, we condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads, fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across the forests of the world, is monstrously comic.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“I found that Dottie's middle age, old age, made rock of much that had been fluid, and eccentricities once charming became too strange for safety or comfort.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
― Lilian Hellman

“All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time.”--”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this season's fashions.”
― Lillian Hellman

“Don’t listen to writers talking about themselves.”
― Lillian Hellman

“به چشمهایم زل زد و گفت :
- با هم درستش می کنیم !
و من تازه فهمیدم تنهایی چه وسعت نامحدودی دارد،
"با هم"......چه لذتی داشت این با هم، حتی اگر با هم هیچ چیزی هم درست نمی شد ؛
حتی اگر تمام سرمایه ام بر باد می رفت .
حسی که به واژه ی " با هم " داشتم را
با هیچ چیزی در این دنیا معاوضه نمی کردم!...
تنها کسی که وحشت تنهایی را درک کرده باشد،
می توانست حس من را در آن لحظات، درک کند!”
― Lilian Hellman

“...I was so often silent angry with Hammett for making the situation hard on me, not knowing then that the dying do not, should not, be asked to think about anything but their own minute of running time.”
― Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir