155 Quotes by Lillian Hellman

[France] may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

I found that Dottie's middle age, old age, made rock of much that had been fluid, and eccentricities once charming became too strange for safety or comfort.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.

It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.

As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain.

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.