Mary > Mary's Quotes

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“But so little does the rest of the world seem to care if we act nobly or otherwise that no help came to her”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A View Of The Harbour

“Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself: 'Later on, I shall remember.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“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

“They met middle-age together-a time when women are necessary to one another-and all the petty but grievous insults of greying hair, crowsfeet, and the loathed encumbrances of unwanted flesh, seemed less sordid when faced and fought (though fought spasmodically and with weak wills) gaily together.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“Anyhow,” he said, seeing her poor face, “people mostly die in nursing homes these days.” That was Roddy all over—that leader of men, who did not know how the world lived, discounting all those who do not go to nursing homes, and Mrs Lippincote herself who believed in dying, if possible, upon the bed where one was born, and who had herself closed (without horror, only grief) the eyes of her dead husband in this very room a month or two before.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“The most bitter thing for a child is to see in another just the kind of son his mother deserved,”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“She could not go on a bus without having an adventure, usually brought about by not minding her own business, and there was always some curious incident to relate to Vinny when he returned home in the evening.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty

“She exasperated him. Society necessarily has a great many little rules, especially relating to the behaviour of women. One accepted them, and life ran smoothly and without embarrassment, or as far as that is possible where there are two sexes. Without the little rules, everything became queer and unsafe. When he had married Julia, he had thought her woefully ignorant of the world; had looked forward, indeed, to assisting in her development. But she had been grown up all the time; or, at least, she had not changed. The root of the trouble was not ignorance at all, but the refusal to accept. ‘If only she would!’ he thought now, staring at her; ‘If only she would accept’ The room was between them. She stood there smiling, blinking still in the bright light. He was still fanning the air peevishly with his hand.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“Remember always to give. That is the thing that will make you grow...”
― Elizabeth Taylor

“Kate seemed to him today to be wounded and on the defensive, a mood that came and went, he knew, with women in their forties.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season

“Kate refused to go to bed - for if she slept, she would have to wake up, she said, and that she could not bear to do-to face afresh the grief she was as yet so little used to.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season

“As a person much confided in, she had learnt how to let her mind wander a little on a tether, and now she looked out of the taxi at the sun flashing high on buildings and thought what a lovely late afternoon it was.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, In a Summer Season

“One of them was the usual Irishman who stands by the bar of every pub selling talk for beer, one of the oldest professions.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's

“I don’t see why” said the Wing Commander. “The very best of families have mad daughters. It never diminishes their importance. Rather increases it.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote's