Lillian Hellman Quotes

...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.

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

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

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.

"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."

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

"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!"

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

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time.” —