Elizabeth Bibesco

Poet

27 Quotes

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

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