A Game of Hide and Seek Quotes

“If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Another day is another world. The difference between foreign countries is never so great as the difference between night and day. Not only are the landscape and the light changed, but people are different, relationships which the night before had progressed at a sudden pace, appear to be back where they were. Some hopes are renewed, but others dwindle: the state of the world looks rosier and death further off; but the state of ourselves and our loves and ambitions seems more prosaic. We begin to regret promises, as if the influence of darkness were like the influence of drink. We do not love our friends so warmly: or ourselves. Children feel less need of their parents: writers tear up the masterpiece they wrote the night before.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“And the idea of him ever since. . . . Our feelings about people change as we grow up: but if we are left with an idea instead of a person, perhaps that never changes. After every mistake Charles made, I expect you thought: 'Vesey wouldn't have done that.' But an idea can't ever make mistakes. He led a perfect life in your brain. When he turned up again, the climate was right for him, tempered by your imagination. But his climate isn't right for you.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.”
― Elizabeth Taylor , A Game of Hide and Seek

“Success is always less awkward. It does not make claims upon pity or tact: congratulations are easier to give than condolences.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Those magazines in hairdressers'," she went on. "Those letters readers write in about their problems. 'Is this love? Am I in love?' As if love were a special kind of fish one catches in one's net . .. sorting through a handful of weeds, wondering 'Is this the right thing? Is this what I am after?' But how can you catch what is only a mood, or a reflection of yourself? Forbidden fruit would be just as boring as the other kind if we ate it all the time.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Departure in the afternoon is depressing to those who are left. The day is so dominated by the one who has gone and, although only half-done, must be got through with that particular shadow lying over it.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game Of Hide And Seek

“Dividends dwindling, she had nothing to sell but her own company, which most people would have paid to avoid.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Harriet, not able to bear this picture nor to ignore it, heedless of former sacrifice, as history makes all of us,”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“congratulations are easier to give than condolences.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“What they thought was heaven, would seem like hell to them in later life.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“That Julia became more contentious as she aged was pitiable. It was the course she took when she could no longer invoke adoration: if she could only summon discord from them, it was at least a reaction of some violence. She did not want to be loved for her own sake; never having known what her own sake was.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“We are complete in the womb itself, she thought in terror. We only unfold.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Jealousy is the most absurd pain of all. How one resents it! To be made to suffer in public–the public indignity, the private pain. The shock of it lays dreadful waste in one’s soul; it discolors the whole world, cancels every remembrance of tenderness.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Or do Mafeking Night and the rest stand in the place of the secret and personal–in the place of what cannot be told and must perish with us–moments when for no reason that we can understand–a warm evening, the scent of leaves, a cock crowing far away–all the air becomes distended with grief. A moment such as this.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“There were no more long summers. The last was when she had played hide-and-seek with Vesey and the children. Since then the years had slipped by, each growing shorter than the one before. It had not seemed a long time, her married life. Summer and winter had run into one another. Betsy had not so much grown up as unrolled – as if she were all there at the beginning, but that each birthday unrolled more of her, made more visible, though suggesting more.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“Perhaps as a result of years with his mother, he was very prone to take things as a reproach.”
― Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek

“I am sorry my commonsense is so common, but I have to be cruel to be kind.”
― Elizabeth Taylor (novelist.), A Game of Hide and Seek