C. Elizabeth Quotes

I will never be by violence constrained to do anything.

The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy.

The word must is not to be used to princes.

... [ellipsis in source] it is true that the world was made in six days, but it was by God, to whose power the infirmity of men isnot to be compared.

If our web be framed with rotten handles, when our loom is well nigh done, our work is new to begin. God send the weaver true prentices again, and let them be denizens.

The end crowneth the work.

we Princes are set as it were upon stages, in the sight and view of all the world. The least spot is soon spied in our garments, a blemish quickly noticed in our doings.

Hang Irish harpers wherever found.

I have not laughed since I married.

There the poor have another advantage ... for they may defy not only death, but every loss by sea or land, for they have nothing to lose.

I'm really lucky because my mom is a good beauty muse.

I've been listening to quite a lot of classical music like Erik Satie, and quite a lot of blues.

At a touch, he explodes like a snapdragon into loud purrs.

People don't feel so quarrelsome in warm weather. They get crotchety in the fall and begin to go to law about things after the first hard frosts.

For a single girl in London, luck isn't always a glass slipper that fits. Sometimes luck is a splash of mud from a passing bus.

The craze of genealogy is connected with the epidemic for divorce. If we can't figure out who our living relatives are, then maybe we'll have more luck with the dead ones.

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

those who despair of life are not long for it.

Can one consider controversy without falling into it?

Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.

Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.

Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

We are making gods out of global celebrities.

Every man born of woman has problems.

Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.

Mitochondrial DNA, which is a sort of abridged version of DNA, is passed directly from mother to child, so it's something that can be looked at to trace matrilineal descent.

You've got to do everything, everything's got to be pointing in the same direction and you've got to really turn this whole economic engine from one that's based on fossil fuels to one that isn't.

The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

I've noticed Dracula was often as practical a fellow as he was a nasty one.

Then you must say to her, 'Madame, I observe that your heart is broken. Allow me to repair it for you.

I love to cook and I've cooked a lot of Bulgarian food over the years.

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

Boys mystified me, although I dreamed vaguely of men.