Elion Quotes & Sayings

Fayez was a good scientist and a friend, but his habit of making fun of everything and derailing anything serious for the sake of humor also made him less useful than he should have been. — James S.A. Corey

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much. — Gertrude B. Elion

I loved to learn everything, everything in sight, and I was never satisfied that I knew everything there was to know in each of my courses. — Gertrude B. Elion

People ask me often [whether] the Nobel Prize [was] the thing you were aiming for all your life, and I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for a Nobel Prize because, if you didn't get it, your whole life would be wasted. What we were aiming at was getting people well, and the satisfaction of that is much greater than any prize you can get. — Gertrude B. Elion

The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I've developed are rewards in themselves. — Gertrude B. Elion

Nobody ... took me seriously. They wondered why in the world I wanted to be a chemist when no women were doing that. The world was not waiting for me. — Gertrude B. Elion

I was born in New York City on a cold January night when the water pipes in our apartment froze and burst. Fortunately, my mother was in the hospital rather than at home at the time. — Gertrude B. Elion

Although I never married, my brother fortunately did, and I have had the pleasure of watching his three sons and daughter grow up. Several of them now have children of their own. We have been a close-knit family, although often separated by distance, and have shared each other's happiness, sorrows, and aspirations. — Gertrude B. Elion

Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant persistence. HOW — Napoleon Hill

For what she'd asked him, in her real voice, a voice that only the heart could hear, was a simple question:

Have you ever once loved another human creature so much that her life was more precious to you than your own?

And his heart had replied in words just as plain:
"Yes," it said, and the power of it nearly blinded her. — Sasha Soren

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise ... — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Over the years, my work became both my vocation and avocation. Since I enjoyed it so much, I never felt a great need to go outside for relaxation. Nevertheless, I became an avid photographer and traveler. Possibly my love for travel stems from the early years when my family seldom went away on vacation. — Gertrude B. Elion

Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told women didn't go into chemistry. I saw no reason why we couldn't. — Gertrude B. Elion

The Black church is extremely important in Black America. I think most Americans themselves believe in a divine power, in a god, and I'm sure that that number increases with Black people. — Harry Lennix

That was the turning point. It was as though the signal was there, 'This is the disease you're going to have to work against.' I never really stopped to think about anything else. It was that sudden. — Gertrude B. Elion

I think it's a very valuable thing for a doctor to learn how to do research, to learn how to approach research, something there isn't time to teach them in medical school. They don't really learn how to approach a problem, and yet diagnosis is a problem; and I think that year spent in research is extremely valuable to them. — Gertrude B. Elion

Maybe I was young and 'cute' (after all, I was only twenty then), but I've learned over the years that when you put white lab coats on chemists, they all look alike! — Gertrude B. Elion

She had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone. — Kristin Hannah

It is important to go into work you would like to do. Then it doesn't seem like work. You sometimes feel it's almost too good to be true that someone will pay you for enjoying yourself. I've been very fortunate that my work led to useful drugs for a variety of serious illnesses. The thrill of seeing people get well who might otherwise have died of diseases like leukemia, kidney failure, and herpes virus encephalitis cannot be described in words. — Gertrude B. Elion

My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father. — Gertrude B. Elion

I clung to that spark of hope,
nurturing it into a small flame that
chased some of the shadows in my heart
away. — Richelle Mead

He wondered what you had to do to lose your driver's license in Italy. — Robert Hellenga

I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ... — Gertrude B. Elion

The level of our success is limited only by our imagination and no act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. — Aesop

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was a child with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and remember enjoying all of my courses almost equally. When it came time at the end of my high school career to choose a major in which to specialize, I was in a quandary. — Gertrude B. Elion

I stood with my hands on the horses' necks, feeling the electricity of their thinking, the blood moving throughout their veins, and the history held neatly within the fabric of every organ of their equine anatomy, as if the body were a storage unit of memory. As I absorbed every nuance of the four-legged creatures, I touched my own stomach, lower back, liver, and spleen to see what the energies felt like. I compared one horse to another, then to myself, fascinated by the way each was so unique yet so the same. — Bethanne Elion