Top 40 Elaine Dundy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I don’t always understand other people’s motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don’t mind. I don’t always understand other people’s motives.”

— Elaine Dundy

2. “I love you. If you hadn’t existed I would have had to invent you.”

— Elaine Dundy

3. “I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror.”

— Elaine Dundy

4. “That’s my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.”

— Elaine Dundy

5. “Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.”

— Elaine Dundy

6. “A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.”

— Elaine Dundy

7. “I hate champagne more than anything in the world next to Seven-Up.”

— Elaine Dundy

8. “To me Vivien Leigh was a tragic heroine of classic proportions: chosen, blessed and abandoned by the gods. Obstinately she tried to control and defy her destiny and to know her story is to be inspired by pity and terror.”

— Elaine Dundy

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9. “It’s amazing how right you can be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.”

— Elaine Dundy

10. “Thanks for the hint,” I laughed. “And thanks for the invitation too. Only I don’t know if I can make it – ” I stalled automatically, marveling at the strength of my reflex – the never-appear-too-eager one, for of course nothing would have stopped me.”

— Elaine Dundy

11. “For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.”

— Elaine Dundy

12. “The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?”

— Elaine Dundy

13. “He tried to kiss me. One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl’s account o how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night. Only I had no flower.”

— Elaine Dundy

14. “As a matter of fact I’d had my hair dyed a marvelous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season.”

— Elaine Dundy

15. “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”

— Elaine Dundy

16. “It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.”

— Elaine Dundy

17. “But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn’t as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven’s sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.”

— Elaine Dundy

18. “Acting doesn’t bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.”

— Elaine Dundy

19. “What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.”

— Elaine Dundy

20. “I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.”

— Elaine Dundy

21. “I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.”

— Elaine Dundy

22. “I’ve never wanted to meet anyone I’ve been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people.”

— Elaine Dundy

23. “Why? Oh, Holy Cow!” I groaned. “Please not to use these ridiculous expressions,” he exploded in exasperation. “I have never heard any other Americans use them except those – what do you call them – those cartoon animals. Mickey Mouse.” “Micky Mice,” I said firmly.”

— Elaine Dundy

24. “To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.”

— Elaine Dundy

25. “If the recently graduated college alumna can’t turn her trained brain to some intelligent awareness of our responsibilities in World Affairs, we’re going to foul up our leadership like England did, as sure as God made little green apples.”

— Elaine Dundy

26. “Silk – that’s what I want rubbing against me. I feel so woolen all the time.”

— Elaine Dundy

27. “Now.′ He said, ‘I have to ask you three question. How old are you? Are you in love? And what in God’s name are you doing here?”

— Elaine Dundy

28. “I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet.”

— Elaine Dundy

29. “I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”

— Elaine Dundy

30. “If his wife doesn’t want him, I certainly don’t, was my way of putting it.”

— Elaine Dundy

31. “All at once I found myself standing there gazing down that enchanted boulevard in the blue, blue evening. Everything seemed to fall into place. Here was all the gaiety and glory and sparkle I knew was going to be life if I could just grasp it.”

— Elaine Dundy

32. “Spring was ravishing around town, bursting and budding and blooming. It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins.”

— Elaine Dundy

33. “There isn’t anything you do in life that isn’t a gamble, Gorce,” he replied.”

— Elaine Dundy

34. “I had a sinister premonition of how embarrassing an homme fatal could be when his charms are no longer fatal to you.”

— Elaine Dundy

35. “I felt experienced without feeling that I, personally, had been through anything.”

— Elaine Dundy

36. “Bollie was a sort of chain-talker, lighting one end of a conversation to another without letting the first go out.”

— Elaine Dundy

37. “We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed fire, tangy as the early morning air.”

— Elaine Dundy

38. “When passing a certain field near the railroad tracks John Allen Cooke, a black former truck driver, often points to it saying: “This is where I used to see Elvis laying around. Killing time. He was real quiet. Thinking about his music, I guess...”

— Elaine Dundy

39. “These waiters were hand-picked for pleurisy, deafness, and a variety of speech defects. They were flushed of skin, gnarled of hand. The dishes that jumped on to the floor from their palsied hands were never referred to again, as it were, but just lay there for the rest of the evening to be ground under foot by passers-by.”

— Elaine Dundy

40. “She stared at the goldfish bowl uncertainly. “I can never remember whether I’ve fed him or not,” she said suddenly. “I kept on feeding them and they kept on dying all the time. All but one. So I don’t know if he killed the rest or if I was over-feeding them or starving them or what. You’re supposed to give them a pinch of food every day. But how big is a pinch anyway?”

— Elaine Dundy