Elaine Dundy Quotes

As a matter of fact I'd had my hair dyed a marvelous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season.

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century.

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

Fate was playing my hand for me and for once in my life I knew better than not to go ahead and let it.

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live
exist or whatever
in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

What's the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it's over.

It's just that I know the world is so wide and full of people and exciting things that I just go crazy every day stuck in these institutions. I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes lots of training. You have to start very young.

I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase mere child.

Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me. When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference.

The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

He looked so - what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so accessible. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability.

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.

It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it's impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.

To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on.

Now called for something drastically un-running away. Now called for
what? Suddenly I had it. Now called for being a librarian! (
Sally Jay Gorce)

Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become ... Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.

[T]wo Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over.

He hated so many people I hardly know anyone any more

That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

Thanks for the hint," I laughed. "And thanks for the invitation too. Only I don't know if I can make it - " I stalled automatically, marveling at the strength of my reflex - the never-appear-too-eager one, for of course nothing would have stopped me.

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life.

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.

If the recently graduated college alumna can't turn her trained brain to some intelligent awareness of our responsibilities in World Affairs, we're going to foul up our leadership like England did, as sure as God made little green apples.

I had nothing better to do, had I, except recount my money and repaint my finger-nails and die of frustration?

I only did it,' I said, 'now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.

I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people.

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, and crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.

What did I feel? Appalled. Astonished. Bewildered. I thought I was doing so well. I thought I was charming the hell out of him. I thought I had him eating out of my hand. Well: I thought I was getting away with it. I might have known. There is always a catch. But suddenly I felt very very young, like a child. Suddenly I wanted to run to - God knows whom, maybe God Himself - why is there never a face I can put to whom I want to run? - and cry, 'But I thought he liked me. All I want is to be liked.' And then, thank heaven, cold rage and fury.

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever!

[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman
that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive
it was nauseating
the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity.
The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom.

It seems to me they're not really happy unless they're at the same time on public display and at their worst.

Tell her next time to look where she's going.

I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.

It's amazing how right you can be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.

But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.

I love you. If you hadn't existed I would have had to invent you.

If I wanted so much to go
if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go? ... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on?

I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends' studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet.

I imagined there must be hundreds and thousands and millions of people quiet in the dark out there, waiting with baited breath for me, up on that stage and bathed in colored lights, to say something. I opened my mouth and - hooray - they were going to listen.