Lillian Hellman Quotes

The only good thing about [aging] is you're not dead.

My mother was dead for five years before I knew that I had loved her very much.

It doesn't pay well to fight for what we believe in.

The past, with its pleasures, its rewards, its foolishness, its punishments, is there for each of us forever, and it should be.

It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute.

Freedom costs you a great deal.

You lose your manners when you're poor.

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 courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice.

Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.

Advances are made by those with at least a touch of irrational confidence in what they can do.

Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

A room of one's own isn't nearly enough. A house, or, best, an island of one's own.

We will not think noble because we are not noble. We will not live in beautiful harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We promise only to do our best and to live out our lives. Dear God, that's all we can promise in truth.

Courtesy is breeding. Breeding is an excellent thing. Always remember that.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

Things start out as hopes and end up as habits.

Nobody knows what you want except you, and no one will be as sorry as you if you don't get it.

Don't you think people often say other people are tough when they do not know how to cheat them?

You can't recover from what you do not understand.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

Callous greed grows pious very fast.

It is a mark of many famous people that they cannot part with their brightest hour.

It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.

God forgives those who invent what they need.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

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 France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

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 stand around and watch them eat.

Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

Writers talk too much.

I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now.

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak.

You are what you are. It is my opinion that trouble in the world comes from people who do not know what they are, and pretend to be something they're not.

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 love affair in the end.

as one grows older, one realizes how little one knows about any relationship, or even about oneself.