Lillian Hellman Quotes

68 quotes in 739 categories

• Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final…
• Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century…
• We all lead more pedestrian lives than we think we do. The boiling of an egg is sometimes more important than the boiling of a…
• Fear comes with middle age.
• Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.
• How often the rich like to play at being poor. A rather nasty game, I've always thought.
• Success and failure are not true op-posites and they're not even in the same class; they're not even a couch and a chair.
• Writers talk too much.
• You lose your manners when you're poor.
• There are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who…
• Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have…
• Mama seemed to do only what my father wanted, and yet we lived the way my mother wanted us to live.
• People change and forget to tell each other.
• Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.
• We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember…
• Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.
• Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.
• I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.
• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
• It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

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