8 Quotes by Elizabeth Eliot

I started to wander aimlessly about the house. Human nature was horrible, people altogether were horrible. I couldn’t be bothered with them. I was disenchanted with the world.

She comes to tea with me at Gunter’s, just as usual, but our conversations are impersonal. Only she told me the other day that she was afraid the world would stop floating.’ ‘That’s Miss White,’ I said. ‘She’s my grandmother’s maid. When she used to cross the Atlantic she was always afraid that the liner would stop floating and sink to the bottom. Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn’t had suddenly altered.

Uncle Henry said he believed he had once seen the Judge at a levee and asked Cassius if he too was at the Bar. ‘No,’ said Cassius. ‘No, I do nothing at all.’ ‘Nothing?’ Uncle Henry, who had done nothing during the whole of his life, sounded shocked. ‘Nothing,’ Cassius repeated. He implied that it was enough that he should exist.

My mother, although she had in a great part shifted the responsibility for me, tried all the same quite hard to do her duty by me. She would from time to time take me on visits to such of her friends as happened also to be afflicted with children.

Later the same afternoon she might try to explain Dunne’s Experiment with Time to me.

You see,’ Alice was very earnest, ‘if we’d lived in the slums and our mother had had fifteen children, and our father had got drunk and knocked us about, we should have been brought up against “real life.”’ ‘Daddy does drink – a bit.’ Anthony was hopeful. ‘It’s what makes him do card tricks after dinner.

Obviously that wasn’t how she thought of herself. She sought to do neither harm nor good. She was detached, intellectual and artistic. She read American books which had been banned in England and English books which had been banned in America.

Geoffrey told us that he had been to a psycho-analyst. As a patient? We felt awkward and impressed; perhaps he was a lunatic, or perhaps he suffered in some of the same ways as the people in the case histories at the back of the book. We looked at him speculatively but didn’t like to ask.