Elegant Elliot Quotes

Soon we began to collect a little group of odd people who would drink with us every cocktail hour. Brigitte, who was a 22-year-old German, very beautiful, could have been on the cover of Stern magazine. Her boyfriend Volker was one of the most beautiful men I'd ever met - people said he looked like James Hunt, the English racecar driver. He was like Billy Budd. He was from Germany and had been a cowboy in Wyoming. Then there was Elford Elliot from England, who had something to do with producing garden gnomes. He was tripping on acid all the time and going out to Delos, this little island off Mykonos, chipping little pieces off the ancient ruins, which he then brought back in the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then there was Bryan, an IBM operator from Australia, who fancied himself as a kind of Oscar Wilde figure. I don't know why. The only story of his I remember was about some Australians who stole a garden gnome from the front lawn of a very elegant mansion and took it for a trip around the world. They would send postcards back to the owner saying things like, 'Having a lovely time in the Fiji Islands' and sign it, 'The Garden Gnome.' After six weeks, they brought the garden gnome back and left it on the lawn with little suitcases full of tiny clothing they'd knitted for it.

Here was a woman who was more Elliot's speed. I could see them together at some elegant, candlelit restaurant, or at the theater, or at a dinner party on the Vineyard. She probably had panties to match all of her bras.

I'm just not a glitter person," I was telling her as she led me back out into the main space, but the words stopped short when she shoved me in front of the mirrors and there I was, glittering at angle after angle. I almost didn't recognize myself. The dress was another simple A-line in shape, gathered at the bust and flowing past my waist to the floor. Its sleeves were loops that circled around my upper arms, baring my shoulders so that my hair could tumble over them or be tied up high to showcase the elegant flow of my throat into my clavicle, which I'd only just now realized was elegant. The dress was black--- my favorite color--- and covered with tiny chips of what must have been rhinestones, small and subtle and scattered enough where I didn't glow like a disco ball under the lights but instead shimmered whenever I moved. I looked like a princess of the night sky.

I stopped in front of my new building, a thrill of pride running through me at the sight. The sight was bright and clear and elegant: Wander. Because my people had wandered all around the world for thousands of years of the Diaspora, picking up local culinary traditions and incorporating them into our own. Even if my menu had taken the incorporation in a more daring direction----some of the dishes I was most excited about were the brisket ramen and the kimchi chopped liver, a play on my finale appetizer but with Korean influences. Luke had helped me with that. It was the one dish that sat on both of our menus.

These islands and the seventy or so other Tuamotus host about 15,000 inhabitants now, who in addition to some French speak their own discrete branch of the Polynesian language, Pa‘umotu. There are pearl farms, resorts, and local communities sustained by the traditional resources of reef and garden, all pressed between the lagoon’s green lens and the open ocean. I have yet to visit very many of these places, but in this aspect they recall to me the words of the author Mark Vanhoenacker—a pilot who writes elegantly of unwalked landscapes sensed instead by overflight. It is a notion he credits to the Alaskans, who may cross broad reaches of their trackless state from above, borne aloft in tiny planes to their own personal corners of the wilderness. I feel this way about the Tuamotus, which for now are like the rings of Saturn passing in the window of my spaceship—unexplored but captivating, if not entirely inviting in their presence.