Eleanor Oliphant Quotes

The gilded confines of the Beauty Hall were not my preferred habitat; like the chicken that had laid the eggs for my sandwich, I was more of a free-range creature. ~ Gail Honeyman

My eye was drawn to a bright green hue, the same shade as a poisonous Amazonian frog, the tiny, delightfully deadly ones. ~ Gail Honeyman

I do not light up a room when I walk into it. No one longs to see me or to hear my voice. I do not feel sorry for myself, not in the least. These are simply statements of fact.
I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive. Something had shifted now, and I realized that I didn't need to wait for death. I didn't want to. ~ Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

I finally managed to open the door, but couldn't raise my head, didn't have the strength to look up. At least the banging had stopped. That was my only objective.
"Jesus Christ!" a man's voice said.
"Eleanor Oliphant," I replied. ~ Gail Honeyman

She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J.D. Salinger or the Unabomber. ~ Gail Honeyman

Three words, Ignis aurum probat. "Fire tests gold." The rest of the phase:"...and adversity tests the brave." How true. A strong password, strong indeed, exactly as required by the computer system. Thank you, Seneca." p. 308 ~ Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they're there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope. ~ Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

I pondered what else I should take for him. Flowers seemed wrong; they're a love token, after all. I looked in the fridge, and popped a packet of cheese slices into the bag. All men like cheese. ~ Gail Honeyman

The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

If everything was in your favor, if you did not have to surmount any great mountains, then you have nothing to be proud of. But if you feel that you have special difficulties, then you must indeed be proud of your achievement. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

My child, seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the King against the Church, and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in return promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring. ~ Eleanor Of Aquitaine

We would like, still the numbers to increase, and so we're hoping that there's far - there will be many more women in the cabinet. It appears there will be and we're hoping that will happen. And - but the ones that have been picked, by and large, we have worked with. There's a couple that we haven't, but there - they look like their bio's are great and so we're - we're pushing on. ~ Eleanor Smeal

One has to live in Washington to know what a city of rumors it is. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

He still looked like something Eleanor didn't have words for. ~ Rainbow Rowell

There was no crime like the crime of stagnation - unproductiveness. With a creative trinity, mind, body and spirit, one must yield something back to the generous earth. ~ Eleanor Dark

Because I was right. For the two of us, home isn't a place. It's a person ~ Stephanie Perkins

If someone betrays you once, it's their fault; if they betray you twice, it's your fault. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The word communist, of course, has become a rallying cry for certain people here just as the word Jew was in Hitler's Germany, a way of arousing emotion without engendering thought. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Love was a fever that came along a few years after chicken-pox and measles and scarlet fever. ~ Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

I was growlin' one day 'cause I was so bent up and crooked; an'what do ye s'pose the little thing said? ... She said I could be glad, anyhow, that I didn't have ter stoop so far ter do my weedin' - 'cause I was already bent part way over. ~ Eleanor H. Porter

We must preserve our right to think and differ. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better. ~ Margaret Oliphant

Before she was allowed to take the albums out of their sleeves, Eleanor used to lay them out on the floor and stare at the artwork. When she was old enough, her dad taught her how to dust the records with a wood-handled velvet brush. She could remember her mother lighting incense ~ Rainbow Rowell

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

You're a Catholic priest. Aren't you all drunks?"
"If I wasn't before, being back in your life might drive me to drink. Between you and Eleanor it's a miracle I'm even lucid."
Kingsley pointed at him. "I take that as a compliment."
"You would. ~ Tiffany Reisz

Dear Bill, I came to this black wall again, to see and touch your name. William R. Stocks. And as I do, I wonder if anyone ever stops to realize that next to your name, on this black wall, is your mother's heart. A heart broken fifteen years ago today, when you lost your life in Vietnam. And as I look at your name, I think of how many, many times I used to wonder how scared and homesick you must have been, in that strange country called Vietnam. And if and how it might have changed you, for you were the most happy-go-lucky kid in the world, hardly ever sad or unhappy. And until the day I die, I will see you as you laughed at me, even when I was very mad at you. And the next thing I knew, we were laughing together. But on this past New Year's Day, I talked by phone to a friend of yours from Michigan, who spent your last Christmas and the last four months of your life with you. Jim told me how you died, for he was there and saw the helicopter crash. He told me how your jobs were like sitting ducks; they would send you men out to draw the enemy into the open, and then, they would send in the big guns and planes to take over. He told me how after a while over there, instead of a yellow streak, the men got a mean streak down their backs. Each day the streak got bigger, and the men became meaner. Everyone but you, Bill. He said how you stayed the same happy-go-lucky guy that you were when you arrived in Vietnam. And he said how you, of all people, should never have been the one to ~ Eleanor Wimbish

He did not mention that his skill was as a carver. He had never sold pounamu. He would not sell pounamu. For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with a god. Gold was not a treasure - this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past. ~ Eleanor Catton

The first Sunday after Valentine's Day is "Don't Beat Yourself Up Day." Have fun and be kinder to yourself. #DontBeatYourselfUpDay ~ Eleanor Brownn

It's going to be okay.
Right.
Because I love you.
Is that why?
It is, actually. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I can't walk five steps without someone on a walkie talkie going, 'She's wandering over there.' I'm pretty stuck, but hey, it's been great. ~ Eleanor Tomlinson

Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply be what is generally called a 'success.' ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on-off switch, no point of return. It's just a first experience, like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special effects- that's just part of the myth. ~ Eleanor Catton

Franklin [D. Roosevelt] had a good way of simplifying things. He made people feel that he had a real understanding of things and they felt they had about the same understanding. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I've been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting," says Julia, "like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I've been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted symbol I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip, and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else's lines. It's a comfort. ~ Eleanor Catton

I learned the power of radio watching Eleanor Roosevelt do her show. I used to go up to Hyde Park and hold her papers. I was just a messenger, but it planted the bug of radio in me. ~ Allen Funt

A handsome prince fights a terrible, beautiful dragon and slays him then carries the head home strapped to his saddle. The lesson is obvious. When one is a monster, one does well to beware knights in shining armor. A good lesson for Eleanor."

Zach heard the meaning behind Søren's words. "Nora is not a monster. She's not perfect obviously. But she's a good person, and to call her a monster is ridiculous."

"You know her that well, do you?" Soren asked, turning to face him full-on. "Before tonight she scared you, didn't she? Her fearlessness, her brazeness, I'm sure it's terrifying at first. Foreign to those who lead proverbial life of quiet desperation as I imagine you do. She scared you with the sheer force of her life and being. But now you look around and think her courage is merely a byproduct of her damage. You imagine I abused her, changed her. And you would save her, as Wesley imagines he can? You would be her knight in shining armor? Yes, before you feared her and now you pity her. I assure you, Zachary, you were right the first time. ~ Tiffany Reisz

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting. ~ Eleanor Catton

Every time you meet a situation you think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it, you find that forever after you are freer than you were before. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: Van Dyck's Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied--for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught, and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction--but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should. ~ Eleanor Catton

I am opposed to 'right to work' legislation because it does nothing for working people, but instead gives employers the right to exploit labor. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Every builder builds somewhat for unknown purposes, and is in a measure a prophet. ~ Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

This living in a democracy is a problem, isn't it? ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

We are doorways, openings into something greater than ourselves, something that we don't understand and will never understand. We have nothing precious in and of ourselves. We are only precious in that we are part of something that is too big to know. ~ Eleanor Morse