Best 83 quotes of Lillian Hellman on MyQuotes

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

People change and forget to tell each other.

Rebels seldom make good revolutionaries, because organized action, even union with other people, is not possible for them.

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

some people are democrats by choice, and some by necessity.

Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation

Styles in wit change so.

The happy problem of our time - longer life.

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

The world is out of shapewhen there are hungry men.

The writer's intention hasn't anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn't matter in the end. Just what comes out.

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

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.

Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?

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.

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 mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

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.

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

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

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.

You can always spot clothes made in a good place.

You lose your manners when you're poor.

As others grown more intelligent under stress, I grow heavy, as if I were an animal on a chain.

But then everybody who has been in the Soviet Union for any length of time has noticed their concern with the United States: we may be the enemy, but we are the admired enemy, and the so-called good life for us is the to-be-good life for them. During the war, the Russian combination of dislike and grudging admiration for us, and ours for them, seemed to me like the innocent rivalry of two men proud of being large, handsome and successful. But I was wrong. They have chosen to imitate and compete with the most vulgar aspects of American life, and we have chosen, as in the revelations of the CIA bribery of intellectuals and scholars, to say, "But the Russians do the same thing," as if honor were a mask that you put on and took off at a costume ball. They condemn Vietnam, we condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads, fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across the forests of the world, is monstrously comic.

[France] may be the only country in the world where the rich are sometimes brilliant.

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

I found that Dottie's middle age, old age, made rock of much that had been fluid, and eccentricities once charming became too strange for safety or comfort.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.

I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.

It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)

...I was so often silent angry with Hammett for making the situation hard on me, not knowing then that the dying do not, should not, be asked to think about anything but their own minute of running time.

Most people coming out of a war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes, for a time, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.

Very thin ladies, any age, with hand sewing on them, have always frightened me, beginning with a rich great-aunt and her underwear embroidered by nuns. The more bones that show on women the more inferior I feel.