Quotes from Elaine Dundy

T]wo Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over.

Please forgive me, but I've never had to change my mind so often at such short notice in my whole life. It's quite breathtaking. You see, first I thought you wanted my body, then I thought you wanted my love, then my life even, happily-ever-after and all that sort of thing, and now it turns out it is merely my money. Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you.' ... For what?' ... For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.

The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless.

I had nothing better to do, had I, except recount my money and repaint my finger-nails and die of frustration?

I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that , if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is that you don't know my life

Boy, this really wasn't one of his days. He just couldn't put a foot right. It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there. Only I'd never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating.

Thanks for the hint," I laughed. "And thanks for the invitation too. Only I don't know if I can make it - " I stalled automatically, marveling at the strength of my reflex - the never-appear-too-eager one, for of course nothing would have stopped me.

The shabbier the snobbier.

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century.

I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, and crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.

As a matter of fact I'd had my hair dyed a marvelous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season.

I imagined there must be hundreds and thousands and millions of people quiet in the dark out there, waiting with baited breath for me, up on that stage and bathed in colored lights, to say something. I opened my mouth and—hooray—they were going to listen.

Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me . When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference.

If the recently graduated college alumna can't turn her trained brain to some intelligent awareness of our responsibilities in World Affairs, we're going to foul up our leadership like England did, as sure as God made little green apples.

If I wanted so much to go-- if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go?... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on?

I'm a real phony, one of those half-baked hot-house plants we're growing nowadays, instead of the honest-to-God two-fisted women we should be...

I hate champagne more than anything in the world next to Seven-Up.

It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it's impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.

W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman--that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive--it was nauseating--the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity. The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom.

I just want to eat about a hundred million oysters and two tons of caviar and go swimming naked in champagne…

For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was a giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze…It was my present for being alive.

We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.

I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes alot of training.