Pygmalion Quotes

“Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Making Life means making trouble”
― George Bernard Shaw

“If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Cold, I was, like snow, like ivory.
I thought "He will not touch me",
but he did.

He kissed my stone-cool lips.
I lay still
as though I’d died.
He stayed.
He thumbed my marbled eyes.

He spoke -
blunt endearments, what he’d do and how.
His words were terrible.
My ears were sculpture,
stone-deaf shells.
I heard the sea.
I drowned him out.
I heard him shout.

He brought me presents, polished pebbles,
little bells.
I didn’t blink,
was dumb.
He brought me pearls and necklaces and rings.
He called them girly things.
He ran his clammy hands along my limbs.
I didn’t shrink,
played statue, shtum.

He let his fingers sink into my flesh,
he squeezed, he pressed.
I would not bruise.
He looked for marks,
for purple hearts,
for inky stars, for smudgy clues.
His nails were claws.
I showed no scratch, no scrape, no scar.
He propped me up on pillows,
jawed all night.
My heart was ice, was glass.
His voice was gravel, hoarse.
He talked white black.

So I changed tack,
grew warm, like candle wax,
kissed back,
was soft, was pliable,
began to moan,
got hot, got wild,
arched, coiled, writhed,
begged for his child,
and at the climax
screamed my head off -
all an act.

And haven’t seen him since.
Simple as that”
― Carol Ann Duffy, The World's Wife

“How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”
― Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion and Related Readings

“A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman.”
― Willa Cather, Willa Cather in Europe: Her Own Story of the First Journey

“HIGGINS [*snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief*] Have some chocolates, Eliza.

LIZA [*halting, tempted*] How do I know what might be in them? I've heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.

*Higgins whips out his penknife; cuts a chocolate in two; puts one half into his mouth and bolts it; and offers her the other half.*

HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half: you eat the other. [*Liza opens her mouth to retort: he pops the half chocolate into it*]. You shall have boxes of them, barrels of them, every day. You shall live on them. Eh?

LIZA [*who has disposed of the chocolate after being nearly choked by it*] I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too ladylike to take it out of my mouth.

(Act 2, Scene 1).”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own.”
― Joseph Roach, It

“A leader's job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create an environment where that greatness can emerge and grow.”
― Brad Smith