Stella Dallas Quotes

“Surprising how well you can sleep on an old Morris chair if you work hard daytimes, or even on the floor if you get cramped. It’s all a matter of getting used to it.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“This wasn’t the time to lie down and submit. What if the world was treating her like a bunch of cruel boys a dog—kicking her from all sides, all at once? She mustn’t put her tail between her legs and yelp and hug the ground. She must stand up and bristle her back, and snarl, and show her teeth if necessary. And she would, too! Oh, there was a lot of fight left in her yet.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“The child seems quite a nice little thing.” “But how long will she stay quite a nice little thing with a mother like that? Really, Mabel!” “And nice little thing or not,” spoke up somebody from the other side of the hearth, “I’m sure I don’t want my son meeting her at dances, and things, as he grows up, and run the risk of having him fall in love with a girl with such a mother!”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“It was all pretense with her when she returned his various little signs and signals. How pitiful to be so old one isn’t even tempted to flirt any more! How amazing to be so crazy about your own child that being crazy about a man loses all interest and excitement in comparison.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“She passed through her childhood blindfolded, picking her way cautiously along, sensitive fingertips stretched out before her to avoid sharp corners and unyielding walls, clinging close to the protection of solitude and isolation.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“It wasn’t bad, for a while playing around alone, and calling myself a grass-widow, as a joke. But the real thing is an entirely different matter. It’s no fun being an extra woman of any kind for long, in society. If you don’t own a husband, or a brother, or some two-legged article in trousers, you drop out of things—out of evening things, anyhow. Of course, there are luncheons, and teas, and women’s shindies left, but I get on best with men, and I look best in evening clothes, too. I’m the kind, anyhow, who wants to take in everything that’s going. The more places you’re seen at the more you go to, and it’s just life to me to keep going!”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“that no emotion can continue long in intensity, in the consciousness of a human being. It runs a course, like a disease. Mercifully. Recuperation begins its gentle work, once facts are comprehended and accepted.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“Myrtle says some men are like that—jealous even of their wives’ women friends. Oh, Stephen, why will you try to take the joy out of everything so? Why don’t you let me have a little fun in life without all this argument? I get sick to death of it.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“One evening, when Stephen started to read out loud to her from one of his favorite authors, in an attempt to lure her inside the books, she told him good-naturedly, for goodness’ sake not to spout any more of that dead, old-fashioned, high-brow stuff to her. It gave her the fidgets.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“During the first year of their married life, there were surprises for him, gentle shocks almost every day, but nothing shattering. For instance, he was amazed to discover how little education a girl can absorb, and go through a high school and two years of normal school besides. Why, Stella didn’t know Thackeray from George Eliot!”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“She had tried to lose Effie. Had succeeded for a while, too, during the height of her social success in Milhampton. But Effie hadn’t stayed lost. Effie was the sort of woman whom you can grind your heel on the dirt and it won’t kill her loyalty. Like a worm. Cut her feelings of friendship for you in two, and the parts will still wriggle”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“These are your new friends, Laurel. Cornelius, over there by the piano, is the oldest. ‘Con’ we call him for short. And Dane comes next. ‘Great Dane’ they call him at school. But I call him little Dane. And the little boy in your father’s lap is Frederick. ‘Rick’ is his nickname. He’s the baby—five years old now. We haven’t any little girl for you, Laurel,” she sighed. How lucky! No girls! Boys weren’t half as cruel.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“Oh, it wasn’t work. I love to read.” “Do you really?” “I didn’t used to so much. It just seemed to come this year—liking it so, I mean.” She turned her face toward him. “When you read a book you like a lot,” she went on, “do you try to stop between sentences and look around and think it over, like eating a piece of candy just as slowly as you can, so it will last longer?”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“to the door of the undesirable little apartment, flinging it open, it seemed to Laurel, with a gesture of disgust. But Laurel’s mother told her she ought to be thankful that such things as cheapest rooms existed. “It is only by occupying the cheapest room in the house, that you and I can go to nice hotels, where nice people go,” Mrs. Dallas explained to her daughter.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“Books!” her mother had said with an exclamation of disappointment when they had been received the preceding December. “A whole pile of old-fashioned books!”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas

“Her heart was bleeding for David Copperfield. Laurel never read David Copperfield when her mother was with her. Today the book, as usual, would be returned to its hiding place behind the cushion in the little parlor when she had finished with it.”
― Olive Higgins Prouty, Stella Dallas