Quotes from Elizabeth Bibesco

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

Happiness is the moment when you cease to make an inventory of joys; it is a glow, a brightness - never a list.

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

He is invariably in a hurry being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.

Are there any punishments in life but our joys turned against us?

You don't have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won't hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn't necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.

He is invariably in a hurry. Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.

It is never good dwelling on good-byes ... it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

Free love is sometimes love but never freedom.

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.