Top 180 Elizabeth Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The day comes in slowly to those who are ill. The night has separated them from the sleepers, who return to them like strangers from a distant land, full of clumsy preparations for the living, the earth itself creaking towards the light.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

152. “I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people’s ideas and thoughts and words, because I’m very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

153. “I haven’t read any of the autobiographies about me.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

154. “I find vocabulary to be a great drawback.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

155. “Humility, never me; it is a characteristic I expect to find in other people.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

156. “As a person much confided in, she had learnt how to let her mind wander a little on a tether, and now she looked out of the taxi at the sun flashing high on buildings and thought what a lovely late afternoon it was.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

157. “Something always made me save myself. Either the Betty Ford Center or going onstage to perform in the theater when many people didn’t think I could do it.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

158. “My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy’s; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

159. “A “name” no longer carries a film. People used to go to the cinema to see a “John Wayne film.” And you don’t have that thing happening now except in the rock world, which has taken the event out of movies.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

160. “We should leave our love-making till the dead of night,’ she thought. ‘And bury it secretly in sleep.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

161. “Being able to go on location and see the world was the greatest perk of all.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

162. “I don’t have a set pattern. I take things as they come. Usually with a great amount of relish. I just lay back and wait for it to happen. And it usually does.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

163. “This is a book that respects kids and their ideas. And in that regard, it places Chasing Vermeer in the tradition of classic favorites fondly recalled from our own childhoods.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

164. “Do you recall a shepherd’s crook, Laurence? And Gladstone-bag? We may be Liberals, but I didn’t know we had a Gladstone-bag.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

165. “She could not go on a bus without having an adventure, usually brought about by not minding her own business, and there was always some curious incident to relate to Vinny when he returned home in the evening.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

166. “With Theo’s help and Nora’s acquiescence she had begun, oysterlike, to coat over, to conceal what could not be borne as it was. The letter was not mentioned again.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

167. “She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

168. “Nearing fifty, Vinny felt more than ever the sweet disappointments only a romantic knows, whose very desires invite frustration; who loves twilight rather than midday, the echo more than the voice, the moon more than the sun, and women better than men;.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

169. “Kate seemed to him today to be wounded and on the defensive, a mood that came and went, he knew, with women in their forties.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

170. “Would you like a cup of tea?” asked Julia, who had enough breeding to know that at all emergencies – birth, death or defeat – cups of tea must at once be offered.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

171. “She felt locked away in herself, but ignorant of her identity, and often she awoke suddenly in the night, without any idea of who she was; thinking, firstly, that she had died.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

172. “Her work failed her. She had reached a desperate, claustrophobic stage of being imprisoned halfway in a novel: there was too much behind her for her to retreat and not a glimmer of light ahead. She sat for hours without writing, staring at the last few wrods on the page, seeing no significance in them. Her characters fell into frozen poses, speech died on their lips: they had sat at a banquet for weeks and she had not the power to bring them to their feet again.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

173. “I don’t see why” said the Wing Commander. “The very best of families have mad daughters. It never diminishes their importance. Rather increases it.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

174. “Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

175. “Kate refused to go to bed – for if she slept, she would have to wake up, she said, and that she could not bear to do-to face afresh the grief she was as yet so little used to.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

176. “Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

177. “She went on slowly and dreamily along the shore. Beautiful women do not need to hurry.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

178. “One of them was the usual Irishman who stands by the bar of every pub selling talk for beer, one of the oldest professions.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

179. “She suddenly felt that she did not know her own son – a sensation common enough to most mothers, but new to her.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

180. “There’s no summing-up, but a sense of incompleteness. After years of building up each unique personality, in the end there is no moment of putting lines beneath the sum and adding up to see what it all amounts too.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

181. “Past and future to him were the realities; the present dull, meaningless, only significant if, as now, going back along the sands, he could say to himself: ‘Later on, I shall remember.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

182. “From somewhere–most certainly not from his mother–he had inherited a feeling that Sunday was a day of rest, and so he fretted through it, and always came to the end of it with a sense of wide ennui and wasted time.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

183. “None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food; but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and disappointments, as once life had.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

184. “The dead belonged to her as no one living could have done.”

— Elizabeth Taylor

185. “Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words.”

— Elizabeth Taylor