Elaine Dundy Quotes & Sayings

I imagined there must be hundreds and thousands and millions of people quiet in the dark out there, waiting with baited breath for me, up on that stage and bathed in colored lights, to say something. I opened my mouth and - hooray - they were going to listen. — Elaine Dundy

He hated so many people I hardly know anyone any more — Elaine Dundy

It's just that I know the world is so wide and full of people and exciting things that I just go crazy every day stuck in these institutions. I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes lots of training. You have to start very young. — Elaine Dundy

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it. — Elaine Dundy

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

I had nothing better to do, had I, except recount my money and repaint my finger-nails and die of frustration? — Elaine Dundy

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

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one's self. — Elaine Dundy

If I wanted so much to go
if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn't I just go? ... What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a words, what the hell was going on? — Elaine Dundy

No matter what you do you've got to try to do it well. Otherwise, it's unbearable. — Elaine Dundy

To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him. — Elaine Dundy

I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. — Elaine Dundy

The shabbier the snobbier. — Elaine Dundy

I find I always have to write something on a steamed mirror. — Elaine Dundy

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

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

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

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

He looked so - what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so accessible. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability. — Elaine Dundy

To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. — Elaine Dundy

[T]he 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

Hated France when I first got over here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first exotic whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer. — Elaine Dundy

... I looked at those patient huddlers on the [Embassy] benches who had hardly moved, and a horrible irony hit me: they wanted so badly to get into the States; I wanted so badly to stay out. — Elaine Dundy

What did I feel? Appalled. Astonished. Bewildered. I thought I was doing so well. I thought I was charming the hell out of him. I thought I had him eating out of my hand. Well: I thought I was getting away with it. I might have known. There is always a catch. But suddenly I felt very very young, like a child. Suddenly I wanted to run to - God knows whom, maybe God Himself - why is there never a face I can put to whom I want to run? - and cry, 'But I thought he liked me. All I want is to be liked.' And then, thank heaven, cold rage and fury. — Elaine Dundy

I've never wanted to meet anyone I've been introduced to. I want to meet all the other people. — Elaine Dundy

The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless. — Elaine Dundy

I only did it,' I said, 'now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour. — Elaine Dundy

I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it. — Elaine Dundy

Now called for something drastically un-running away. Now called for
what? Suddenly I had it. Now called for being a librarian! (
Sally Jay Gorce) — Elaine Dundy

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

Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it. — Elaine Dundy

[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman
that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive
it was nauseating
the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity.
The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom. — Elaine Dundy

I love you. If you hadn't existed I would have had to invent you. — Elaine Dundy

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

I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that, if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is that you don't know my life — Elaine Dundy

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

Fate was playing my hand for me and for once in my life I knew better than not to go ahead and let it. — Elaine Dundy

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we're all going to live forever! — Elaine Dundy

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment. — Elaine Dundy

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

Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become ... Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. — Elaine Dundy

Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me. When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference. — Elaine Dundy

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous. — Elaine Dundy

I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase mere child. — Elaine Dundy

I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, and crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell. — Elaine Dundy

At some point in my life I realized I knew only celebrities, I didn't know any real people. I think it was a master stroke of Fate that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and enjoying enduring friendships with some. — Elaine Dundy

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

That's the story of my life. Someone's behavior strikesme as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose. — Elaine Dundy

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century. — Elaine Dundy

It seems to me they're not really happy unless they're at the same time on public display and at their worst. — Elaine Dundy

[T]wo Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over. — Elaine Dundy

What's the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it's over. — Elaine Dundy

[W]hat is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive - and has never put in an honest day's work in its life. — Elaine Dundy

You're not playing the game," he said grimly. "English gossip isn't supposed to get back to the person it's about. — Elaine Dundy

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live
exist or whatever
in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one. — Elaine Dundy

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

I hate champagne more than anything in the world next to Seven-Up. — Elaine Dundy

Tell her next time to look where she's going. — Elaine Dundy

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable. — Elaine Dundy

I'm a real phony, one of those half-baked hot-house plants we're growing nowadays, instead of the honest-to-God two-fisted women we should be ... — Elaine Dundy

I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes alot of training. — Elaine Dundy