C. Elizabeth Quotes
I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.
I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.
But after a certain point in a marriage, you stopped having a certain kind of fight, Olive thought, because when the years behind you were more than the years in front of you, things were different.
I have to pay attention to what I have felt and observed, then push these responses to an extreme while keeping the story within the realm of being psychologically and emotionally true.
I love theater. I love sitting in an audience and having the actors right there, playing out what it means to be a human being.
If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.
Without a doubt my mother was an inspiration for my writing. This is true in many ways, but mostly because she is a wonderful storyteller, without even knowing it.
I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.
Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.
For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.
My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.
Oh, gosh, Olive. I'm so embarrassed." "No need to be," Olive tells her. "We all want to kill someone at some point." (179)
It’s just that I’m the kind of person,' Rebecca continued, 'that thinks if you took a map of the whole world and put a pin in it for every person, there wouldn’t be a pin for me.
And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.
He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away.
What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.
What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.
... to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.
It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress.
The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.
The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.
It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.
Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.
It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.
I love acting so much more than singing, and hopefully I'd be able to venture into that properly.
Honestly I prefer dressing for comfort rather than style, so whatever is comfortable and looks decent, that'll do.
