Lillian Hellman Quotes

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

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.

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

A man should be jailed for telling lies to the young.

"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 how 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.

That is all I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what is there for me now."

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

People change and forget to tell each other.

"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."

I am prepared to waive the privilege against self-incrimination and to tell you everything you wish to know about my views or actions if your committee will agree to refrain from asking me to name other people. If the committee is unwilling to give me this assurance, I will be forced to plead the privilege of the fifth amendment at the hearing.

Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

"به چشمهایم زل زد و گفت :
- با هم درستش می کنیم !
و من تازه فهمیدم تنهایی چه وسعت نامحدودی دارد،
"با هم"......چه لذتی داشت این با هم، حتی اگر با هم هیچ چیزی هم درست نمی شد ؛
حتی اگر تمام سرمایه ام بر باد می رفت .
حسی که به واژه ی " با هم " داشتم را
با هیچ چیزی در این دنیا معاوضه نمی کردم!...
تنها کسی که وحشت تنهایی را درک کرده باشد،
می توانست حس من را در آن لحظات، درک کند!"