Elizabeth Taylor Quotes

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.

It is very strange that the years teach us patience - that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

I don't entirely approve of some of the things I have done, or am, or have been. But I'm me. God knows, I'm me.

Big girls need big diamonds.

A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.

You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal.

You just do it. You force yourself to get up. You force yourself to put one foot before the other, and God damn it, you refuse to let it get to you. You fight. You cry. You curse. Then you go about the business of living. That’s how I’ve done it. There’s no other way.

I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I'm not afraid to look behind them.

When people say: She's got everything. I've only one answer: I haven't had tomorrow.

Success is a great deodorant.

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden.She'll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame

All women need makeup. Don't let anybody tell you different. The only woman who was pretty enough to go without makeup was Elizabeth Taylor and she wore a ton.

I've only slept with the men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?

Successful women don't sleep until noon.

Now is the time for guts and guile

Even the most powerful woman needs a place to unwind.

You might as well live

the problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure there going to have some pretty annoying virtues

The most sensible thing to do to people you hate is to drink their brandy.

My dear girl, you must cultivate a taste for the finer things. Civilized pleasures give meaning to life.

Elizabeth Anne Taylor April 25, 1974 - April 25, 2004 Our Sweetheart, Only resting

I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

From the time I met him, he left me little clues of a man, a trail of bread crumbs to a gingerbread cottage. Inside the cottage were peeling pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe that keep sliding to the floor because the walls were too sweet to hold the Blu-Tack. I tried to pick the posters off the floor and got so distracted, I ended up in an oven. So I climbed out of the oven and out of the house and I was saving myself, but it hurt so bad. I found the boy I loved, but he didn't want to hug me because I was blistered and spotted with bread crumbs. I looked up close because, up close, I could always see myself reflected in the surface of his shiny, iconic beauty. But suddenly he had pores, grey hairs, and chapped lips. And I couldn't see a damn thing.

The whole point is that writing has a pattern and life hasn't. Life is so untidy. Art is so short and life so long. It is not possible to have perfection in life but it is possible to have perfection in a novel.

Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.   Elizabeth Taylor

To them the appearance of the Hell’s Angels must have seemed like a wonderful publicity stunt. In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome: Frank Sinatra, Alexander King, Elizabeth Taylor, Raoul Duke... they have that extra “something”.

Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.

When the sun comes up, I have morals again.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland

Yes, damn it, I love you! But the bedroom is not the boardroom, Robert. In the boardroom only one person can be in charge.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

If there's anything I hate is someone who questions my credit.

Elizabeth lay face-down on the massage table, and allowed Marco to relieve the stress of the business day with firm and knowing fingers. Success, she decided, was often a matter of knowing when to relax.

I've been pronounced dead and I've read my own obituaries. And they were the best reviews I ever read.

Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain.

Its best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this...a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness.

All that she saw and felt tired her, and she longed to shut out the world and be secure in the womb of her imagination.

Elizabeth studied the blurry tabloid photo, which showed her cousin Mary Stuart leaving a Paris disco at dawn, drunkenly clinging to the arm of a French tennis pro. The message was very clear. Put passion first and you end up neither loved nor respected.

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

The fan was spinning and as the shadows passed over the white ceiling I let my eyes unfocus until all of it looked like a universe being born or a planet unraveling, some creation or catastrophe depending on which way gravity was going and where you were standing. So instead of Elizabeth Taylor I thought about stars and how little I knew about them, and how if I was an explorer and I had to sail a boat across the ocean without rador or an electronic compass I’d be screwed because the only constellations I knew were the Big Dipper and Little Dipper and I always got them confused. And even though I knew I’d never have to sail that boat I still wished I knew more about stars and other things. And I wished I could remember lying in the back yard as a kid with my hands locked behind my head, looking up at the night sky and dreaming. But I couldn’t, because it wasn’t something I ever did. It would have been a nice memory though

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.

another of their acquaintances finds himself mesmerised by the way that he 'always had something of ... rivetting stupidity to say on any subject'.

I was raised on The Notebook and fairy tales and Taylor Swift. It’s hard not to idealize dumb things, I guess.

Like Elizabeth Taylor said, ‘Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together.

For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

Who really needs a ring that big? I ask you. It was rings that big that made our grandmothers think Elizabeth Taylor was a whore.

She was a tall woman with big bones and a noble face, dark eyebrows and a neatly folded jowl. She would have made a distinguished-looking man and, sometimes, wearing evening dress, looked like some famous general in drag.

The word "slut" has been invoked in the public discourse as an ugly slur. But Langella's book celebrates sluttiness as a worthy -- even noble -- way of life... When Bette Davis wants to have "racy phone conversations...rife with foreplay," he agrees because how could you not? When Elizabeth Taylor says, "Come on up, baby, and put me to sleep," who is he to resist? (He does make her chase him first.) By his cheerful debauchery, Langella reveals something certain ommmentators have obscured: sluts are the best---hungry for experience and generous wih themselves in its pursuit.

If love is a battlefield and we all get scars....These were my reminders…my necessary thorns.

Since I was a little girl, I believed I was a child of destiny, and if that is true, Richard Burton was surely my fate.

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

People are sorry for brides who lose their husbands early, from some accident, or war. And they should be sorry, Mrs Palfrey thought. But the other thing is worse.

The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.

...pensaba en el amor y en sus espantosas desigualdades. Siempre hay alguien que ofrece la mejilla y otro que la besa.

If you hate it, if you find you have made a mistake, it will still have been a change. As with a holiday, if it ends in your wishing to come home, its aim is accomplished.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word ‘honey skinned’ recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned.

The first time I fell in love with Zoe, she was scream singing a Taylor Swift song in my parents' living room while my sister Luna laughed at her. At least, I think that's the first time. It's happened so many times now.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we report to work.

La señora Palfrey durmió plácidamente y toda la noche, con los labios ligeramente estirados, como si estuviese a punto de sonreír.

Think Good Thoughts

Remember always to give. That is the thing that will make you grow...

Creatively Outspoken and Dramatically Quiet

Perhaps I was hosting my own personal sexual revolution. You know the kind that will not be televised.

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.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

But so little does the rest of the world seem to care if we act nobly or otherwise that no help came to her

One is left so much on one’s own. People are shy of the bereaved. They don’t quite know what to be.

It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.

I love not being me, not being Elizabeth Taylor, but being Richard Burton's wife.

Elizabeth Taylor was wearing an ensemble that made me think she’d looked in her closet that morning and said, “What shall I wear? . . . Everything!

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.

She got out of her dress and stood there in a white slip, like Elizabeth Taylor’s white slip in the film, though this actress looked both less artificial and also somehow less convincing. I could see a care label bunched inside the seam of the slip she was wearing, which destroyed the effect of reality for me, although the slip and its care label were undoubtedly themselves real. I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed.

Mary never made it to the board meeting. Cunning Elizabeth simply arranged for her cousin's tennis instructor to "delay" her for an hour or two. The man was evidently a superb athlete, though it was entirely Mary's fault that she fell asleep afterwards. Elizabeth took control of the company that very afternoon, by a vote of six to one, while a sated Mary slept. And the silly girl never knew what hit her.

Now – by omission – she was trying to get away with what she thought of as a whopper, and she wondered if either she or Ludo would be equal to it. He had seemed ready enough to fall in with her; had had no scruples as she herself had; had thought it all rather a lark. She had tracked him down in Harrods Banking Hall.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Silence please!" Every one was startled. They looked round-at each other, at the walls. Who was speaking? The Voice went on- a high clear voice. You are charged with the following indictments: Edward George Armstrong, that you did upon the 14th day of March, 1925, cause the death of Louisa Mary Clees. Emily Caroline Brent, that upon the 5th November, 1931, you were responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor. William Henry Blore, that you brought about the death of James Stephen Landor on October 10th, 1928. Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, that on the 11th day of August, 1935, you killed Cyril Ogilvie Hamilton. Philip Lombard, that upon a date in February, 1932, you were guilty of the death of twenty-one men, members of an East African tribe. John Gordon Macarthur, that on the 4th of January, 1917, you deliberately sent your wife's lover, Arthur Richmond, to his death. Anthony James Marston, that upon the 14th day of November last, you were guilty of murder of John and Lucy Combes. Thomas Rogers and Ethel Rogers, that on the 6th of May, 1929, you brought about the death of Jennifer Brady. Lawrence John Wargrave, that upon the 10th day of June, 1930, you were guilty of the murder of Edward Seton. Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defense?

You hang on because you realize that everything fades away; everything passes. You can survive anything if you choose to do so. Beauty fades, so don't take it seriously. It's the bowl of candy someone left behind. You pounce on it too often and you pay the price, but it was heaven for a minute or two. Fame is a bit of perfume coasting on the air. Sniff deeply and walk on. What lasts is friendship, partnerships of the soul that keep you focused and strong and in your place. I now long for times with friends--evenings that don't require denial, a pill, or a girdle. Just my heart, my time, and a rich history." Elizabeth Taylor/Interview with James Grissom/1991 #FolliesOfGod

Among those Mark and I networked with, Elizabeth Taylor was highly respected for her quiet activism against mind control. It was no surprise when she whisked Michael off to a highly specialized hospital in the UK to have him deprogrammed.

To be a queen , do you have to rule a country or marry a king? Not necessarily---there are other ways to be considered royal today. For example, take Elizabeth Taylor or Jacqueline Onassis. Would you dare to call either of these grand dames less than regal?

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.

Nobody is trial-free, but we have a choice.  We can choose to allow our experiences to hold us back, and to not allow us to become great or achieve greatness in this life.   Or we can allow our experiences to push us forward, to make us grateful for every day we have and to be all the more thankful for those who are around us.”- Elizabeth Smart

He almost dared to say that her graying mustache gave her a military look, a more distinguished air: his private smile at the thought he had withheld ruffled her as much.

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

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

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.

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.

People want things to be complicated, but they have to love themselves first and then each other and then it will seed everywhere

Silence, almost, in the dining-room. They lowered themselves into their chairs. As they aged, the women seemed to become more like old men, and Mr Osmond became more like an old woman.

It's not as bad as Taylor Swift,” he says. “What did Taylor Swift ever do to you?” I ask, defensively. “Nothing,” he smirks, slowing down as we pull into the yard. “Just wondered what you'd say. Come on.

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 was counting on Marco to keep cousin Mary occupied until after the board meeting was over. A piece of cheese might catch a mouse, but an afternoon alone with a muscular masseur would ensnare her cousin far more effectively. And afterwards, while Mary lay sated and sleeping upon a massage table, wiser heads could determine the company's future. There were times, Elizabeth thought, when success in business demanded utter ruthlessness.

And the idea of him ever since. . . . Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I expect you thought: 'Vesey wouldn't have done that.' But an idea can't ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain. When he turned up again, the climate was right for him, tempered by your imagination. But his climate isn't right for you.

Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.

The media spotlight was still on him for his blatant pedophilic actions, however, and the CIA could not allow for the press to discover the causation. LaToya had already been silenced, and there would be no limits to how far the government would go to cover this up. When Mark received a tip from an Intelligence contact to watch a televised broadcast at 3AM, we tuned in. Elizabeth Taylor’s press agent was raising public awareness to his and Ms. Taylor’s plight. Their lives were on the line since the CIA had stormed her residence and physically extracted Michael Jackson before he could be deprogrammed. Once again mind control was covered up at all costs.

Literately’ was used in a novel by Elizabeth Griffiths. While no other examples of use have been forthcoming, it is, in my opinion, an elegant extension of ‘literate’. Dr. Murray agreed I should write an entry for the Dictionary, but I have since been told it is unlikely to be included. It seems our lady author has not proved herself a ‘literata’- an abomination of a word coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that refers to a ‘literary lady’. It too has only one example of use, but its inclusion is assured. This may sound like sour grapes, but I can’t see it catching on. The number of literary ladies in the world is surely so great as to render them ordinary and deserving members of the literati.

As the long limousine purred to life Edwina felt as if she were Elizabeth, setting sail to battle the Spanish Armada. She was Elizabeth, damn it! What she had built no one was going to take away from her. Not her house, not her hotels, not her fine stable of horses -- and most especially not the young thoroughbred she had left sleeping by the side of her Olympic-size outdoor pool. Some pleasures, she decided, were simply too enticing to give up.

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. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat. As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony. In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart. If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.

If you’re hoping for a good meal, you’ve come to the wrong place. Miss Cameron has already attempted to sacrifice herself on the altar of domesticity this morning, and we both narrowly escaped death from her efforts. I’m cooking supper,” he finished, “and it may not be much better.” “I’ll try my hand at breakfast,” the vicar volunteered good-naturedly. When Elizabeth was out of earshot, Ian said quietly, “How badly is the woman hurt?” “It’s hard to say, considering that she was almost too angry to be coherent. Or it might have been the laudanum that did it.” “Did what?” The vicar paused a moment to watch a bird hop about in the rustling leaves overhead, then he said, “She was in a rare state. Quite confused. Angry, too. On the one hand, she was afraid you might decide to express your ‘tender regard’ for Lady Cameron, undoubtedly in much the way you were doing it when I arrived.” When his gibe evoked nothing but a quirked eyebrow from his imperturbable nephew, Duncan sighed and continued, “At the same time, she was equally convinced that her young lady might try to shoot you with your own gun, which I distinctly understood her to say the young lady had already tried to do. It is that which I feared when I heard the gunshots that sent me galloping up here.” “We were shooting at targets.” The vicar nodded, but he was studying Ian with an intent frown. “Is something else bothering you?” Ian asked, noting the look. The vicar hesitated, then shook his head slightly, as if trying to dismiss something from his mind. “Miss Throckmorton-Jones had more to say, but I can scarcely credit it.” “No doubt it was the laudanum,” Ian said, dismissing the matter with a shrug. “Perhaps,” he said, his frown returning. “Yet I have not taken laudanum, and I was under the impression you are about to betroth yourself to a young woman named Christina Taylor.” “I am.” His face turned censorious. “Then what excuse can you have for the scene I just witnessed a few minutes ago?” Ian’s voice was clipped. “Insanity.” They walked back to the house, the vicar silent and thoughtful, Ian grim. Duncan’s untimely arrival had not bothered him, but now that his passion had finally cooled he was irritated as hell with his body’s uncontrollable reaction to Elizabeth Cameron. The moment his mouth touched hers it was as if his brain went dead. Even though he knew exactly what she was, in his arms she became an alluring angel.