Elizabeth Bibesco

“Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.”

“Irony is the hygiene of the mind.”

“It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.”

“What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.”

“Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?”

“Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.”

“Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.”

“The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!”

“What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.”

“Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.”

“There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.”

“A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.”

“To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.”

“All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.”

“Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.”

“Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.”

“Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting”

“The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?”

“Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.”

“There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.”