Dorothy Gilman Quotes & Sayings

Hell is more like boredom, or not having enough to do, and too much time to contemplate one's deficiencies. — Dorothy Gilman

The best things arrive on time. — Dorothy Gilman

It's compassion that makes gods of us. — Dorothy Gilman

Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they're fresh and unformed ... — Dorothy Gilman

She drew herself up to her full height - it was a little difficult on a donkey - and said primly, I have always found that in painful situations it is a sensible idea to take each hour as it comes and not to anticipate beyond. But oh how I wish I could have a bath! — Dorothy Gilman

When a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness. — Dorothy Gilman

When we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again. — Dorothy Gilman

Old clothes, old friends, old books. One needs constants in a traveling life. — Dorothy Gilman

A man from hell is not afraid of hot ashes. — Dorothy Gilman

Do you like Magda too?" His gaze left the gate to sweep the courtyard. "She seems pleasant enough when she's not drugged. But then she nearly always is, isn't she?" He — Dorothy Gilman

There are no happy endings there are only happy people. — Dorothy Gilman

Will anything but fanaticism make for change? Wisdom and compromise come later. — Dorothy Gilman

I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy. — Dorothy Gilman

What continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened. — Dorothy Gilman

In the morning when Mrs. Pollifax awoke she realized at once that a fateful day was beginning. She lay and thought about this dispassionately, almost wonderingly, because to every life there eventually came a moment when one had to accept the fact that the shape, the pattern, the direction of the future was entirely out of one's hands, to be decided unalterably by chance, by fate or by God. There was nothing to do but accept, and from this to proceed, doing the very best that could be done. — Dorothy Gilman

You haven't been planting seeds of insurrection, have you, Duchess?"
"Well, it's a change from planting geraniums," she retorted. — Dorothy Gilman

Perhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt. — Dorothy Gilman

That's what terrorism is, basically - pure theater. Nothing in particular is ever accomplished by it, other than to focus attention on a small group of people who seize absolute power by threatening everything that holds civilization together. — Dorothy Gilman

Both therapy and friendship possessed the common denominator of discovering a self ... — Dorothy Gilman

Everything is a matter of choice, and when we choose are we not gambling on the unknown and its being a wise choice?And isn't it free choice that makes individuals of us? We are eternally free to choose ourselves and our futures. I believe myself that life is quite comparable to a map like this a constant choice of direction and route. — Dorothy Gilman

If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time. — Dorothy Gilman

It wasn't that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more? — Dorothy Gilman

We overlook how much in our lives is invisible; love, for instance; thought, God, the future, time, faith, hope and even the electricity that brings us light. — Dorothy Gilman

Brainwashing, thought Mrs. Pollifax contemptuously, and suddenly realized that she was not afraid. She had endured other crises without losing her dignity
births, widowhood, illnesses
and she was experienced enough to know now that everything worthwhile took time and loneliness, perhaps even one's death as well. — Dorothy Gilman

If life was like a body of water, she had asked that she be allowed to walk again in its shallows; instead she had been abruptly seized by strong currents and pushed into deep water. — Dorothy Gilman

It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves. — Dorothy Gilman

Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all ... Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know. — Dorothy Gilman

Carstairs looked grim. "I gave Mrs. Pollifax to Interpol like a gift and they give every evidence of having discarded her like a boring Christmas tie."
Bishop said soberly, "Well, you know she doesn't look like a gift at first glance, sir. She confuses people by looking the nice cozy grandmother type. — Dorothy Gilman

It's terribly important for everyone, at any age, to live to his full potential. Otherwise a kind of dry rot sets in, a rust, a disintegration of personality, — Dorothy Gilman

People need dreams, there's as much nourishment in 'em as food. — Dorothy Gilman

My rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other. — Dorothy Gilman

And wished with all her heart that she wasn't so tired, wished that a broken wrist would radiate violent pain instead of this strange numbing ache that was exhausting her by its subtlety and consistency. — Dorothy Gilman

People misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry. — Dorothy Gilman