C. Elizabeth Quotes

Memory - the very skin of life.

The outrages of the powerful, the insolence of the rich, scorn of the proud, and malice of the uncharitable, all beating against the broken spirit of the unfortunate.

The muses crown virtue when fortune refuses to do it.

Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

My father was an academic, an eccentric. He was a lecturer.

When men and women think, the first step to progress is taken.

I don't believe in villains - just people who channel their energy in the wrong way.

I come from food the way some people come from money. Food was the medium I grew up in, what we talked about, what shaped our days.

The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.

Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.

I was like many another who starts an intrigue timidly. Once into it, I had to go on, and therefore I had to harden my sensibilities.

I never was lost. I was bewildered right bad once for as much as a week, but not lost.

I don't want someone to watch sports in bed. That drives me nuts.

Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!

We need to claim our power for something beautiful, something harmonious and something globally healthy.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism.

It's appalling that there should be hunger anywhere, but particularly in a country like America, where there is also such great wealth.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

...what will we someday do, I always wonder, without the pleasures of turning through books and stumbling on things we never meant to find?

There is nothing harder, at moments, than talking to someone who has all the power of silence.

It's funny; in this era of e-mail and voice mail and all those things that even I did not grow up with, a plain old paper letter takes on amazing intimacy.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

I saw the lovely arch Of rainbow span the sky, The gold sun burning As the rain swept by.

Only of one thing I am sure: when I dream I am always ageless.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

Some ideas, like dandelions in lawns, strike tenaciously: you may pull off the top but the root remains, drives down suckers and may even sprout again.

Does breakfast in bed count as a morning workout?

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

I shall lend credit to nothing against my people which parents would not believe against their own children.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel - as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can - then I am nothing. Let me feel guilty ... don't try to educate me ... don't protect me.

Exhibitionism and a nervous wish for concealment, for anonymity, thus battle inside the buyer of any piece of clothing.

I find that I sent wolves not shepherds to govern Ireland, for they have left me nothing but ashes and carcasses to reign over!

The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

The greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.

Young heads take example of the ancient

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

Parents want their kids’ approval, a reversal of the past ideal of children striving for their parents’ approval.

No foteball player be used or suffered within the City of London and the liberties thereof upon pain of imprisonment.

For, what is a family without a steward, a ship without a pilot, a flock without a shepherd, a body without a head, the same, I think, is a kingdom without the health and safety of a good monarch.

[On the birther movement:] Here we are, quadrillions of bytes deep into the Information Age. And yet information, it seems, has never mattered less.

What I have found is, anything one keeps hidden should now and then be hidden somewhere else.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.