Quotes from Elizabeth Taylor

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.

The most bitter thing for a child is to see in another just the kind of son his mother deserved

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.

She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.

pensaba en el amor y en sus espantosas desigualdades. Siempre hay alguien que ofrece la mejilla y otro que la besa.

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.

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.

We should leave our love-making till the dead of night,' she thought. 'And bury it secretly in sleep.

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.

From somewhere–most certainly not from his mother–he had inherited a feeling that Sunday was a day of rest, and so he fretted through it, and always came to the end of it with a sense of wide ennui and wasted time.

One of them was the usual Irishman who stands by the bar of every pub selling talk for beer, one of the oldest professions.

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.

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.

Do you recall a shepherd's crook, Laurence? And Gladstone-bag? We may be Liberals, but I didn't know we had a Gladstone-bag.

Would you like a cup of tea?" asked Julia, who had enough breeding to know that at all emergencies—birth, death or defeat—cups of tea must at once be offered.

It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.

Those magazines in hairdressers'," she went on. "Those letters readers write in about their problems. 'Is this love? Am I in love?' As if love were a special kind of fish one catches in one's net . .. sorting through a handful of weeds, wondering 'Is this the right thing? Is this what I am after?' But how can you catch what is only a mood, or a reflection of yourself? Forbidden fruit would be just as boring as the other kind if we ate it all the time.

Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.

Men are not forced to turn their desolation to advantage as women are. It's easier for them to dissipate their passion, quell their restlessness in other ways.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

He almost dared to say that her graying mustache gave her a military look, a more distinguished air: his private smile at the thought he had withheld ruffled her as much.

The dead belonged to her as no one living could have done.

Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it.

She went on slowly and dreamily along the shore. Beautiful women do not need to hurry.