Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Quotes & Sayings

More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Lips all crude scarlet, and eyes as absurdly big and round as a child's good-by kiss. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Supplementing the far, remote Glory-of-God expression in his face, the glory-of-doughnuts shone suddenly very warmly. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Truth out of season was sourer than strawberries at Christmas time. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Provide for her Future - if you can! - That's my motto! - But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Marriage is not for me. I tell you that I am Blank Verse. I am talent, and I do not rhyme with Love. I am talent and I do not rhyme with man. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

As far as I can reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's heaven that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest, teeniest, no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure of. Answers may kill 'em dead enough, but it's questions that eats 'em alive. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Sorrow in the tongue will talk itself cured, if you give it a chance; but sorrow in the eyes has a wicked, wicked way now and then of leaking into the brain. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

You don't seem to understand," I whispered. "It's Christmas relationships that are worrying Carol and me so! It worries us dreadfully! Oh, of course we understand all about the Little Baby Christ! And the camels! And the wise men! And the frankincense! That's easy! But who is Santa Claus? Unless - unless - ?" It was Carol himself who signaled me to go on. "Unless - he's the Baby Christ's grandfather?" I thought Derry Willard looked a little bit startled. Carol's ears turned bright red. "Oh, of course - we meant on his mother's side!" I hastened to assure him. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Then Night came down like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp, and smutted[9] first the bedquilt, then the hearth-rug, then the window-seat, and then at last the great, stormy, faraway outside world. But sleep did not come. Oh, no! Nothing new came at all except that particularly wretched, itching type of insomnia which seems to rip away from one's body the whole kind, protecting skin and expose all the raw, ticklish fretwork of nerves to the mercy of a gritty blanket or a wrinkled sheet. Pain came too, in its most brutally high night-tide; and sweat, like the smother of furs in summer; and thirst like the scrape of hot sand-paper; and chill like the clammy horror of raw fish. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

If there's - one person on the face of this earth who makes me sick it's the ninny who calls a thing 'improbable' because it happens to be outside his own special, puny experience of life. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

I wish I could have lived just one day when the world was new. I wish - I wish I could have reaped just one single, solitary, big Emotion before the world had caught it and - appraised it - and taxed it - and licensed it - and staled it! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

The time to grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed exacty to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow old, or die young, together. But after that day
! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

If Beauty is excuse enough for Being, it sure takes Plainness then to feel the real necessity for - Doing. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

And while you and the rest of your kind are battling together - year after year - for this special privilege of being 'bored to death,' the 'real girl' that you're asking about, the marvelous girl, the girl with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable' - is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner - or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom - or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room - waiting to be discovered! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

A fellow's a fool when he marries who don't go to work deliberately to study and understand his wife. Women are awfully understandable if you only go at it right. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

What? Do you dare smile and suggest for a moment that just because of the Absence between us I cannot make myself vivid to you? Ho! Silly boy! Don't you know that the plainest sort of black ink throbs more than some blood - and the touch of the softest hand is a harsh caress compared to the touch of a reasonably shrewd pen? Here - now, I say - this very moment: Lift this letter of mine to your face, and swear - if you're honestly able to - that you can't smell the rose in my hair! — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Now everybody who knows anything at all knows perfectly well that even a business letter does not deserve the paper on which it is written unless it contains at least one significant phrase that is worth waking up in the night to remember and think about. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Oh any sentimental person can cry at night, but when you begin to cry in the morning - to lie awake and cry in the morning - ... — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Incidentally her head ached and her shoulders ached and her lungs ached and the ankle-bones of both feet ached quite excruciatingly. But nothing of her felt permanently incapacitated except her noble expression. Like a strip of lip-colored lead suspended from her poor little nose by two tugging wire-gray wrinkles her persistently conscientious sickroom smile seemed to be whanging aimlessly against her front teeth. The sensation certainly was very unpleasant. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Love was a fever that came along a few years after chicken-pox and measles and scarlet fever. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

One was a Cartoon Artist with a heart like chiffon and a wit as accidentally malicious as the jab of a pin in a flirt's belt. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts its weirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some petted Princeling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying, wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slender white rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into your gray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. And the secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soul you could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lure of personality, or the lure of physiognomy - a mere accidental, coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone and twittering facial muscles. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

Why, I've been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me - the wild, restless, breathless, discontented soul of me - never sat down before in all its life - I say, until my frightened hand cuddled into his broken one. I tell you I don't pretend to explain it, I don't pretend to account for it; all I know is - that smothering there under all that horrible wreckage and everything - the instant my hand went home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went over me. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

The Pretty Lady's brains were almost entirely in her fingers. — Eleanor Hallowell Abbott