The Long-Winded Lady Quotes

“I find that a decision to do something leaves me free, while a decision not to do something only leaves me surrounded with undone things and endless, exasperating chances of changing my mind.

p.175 from "Giving Money in the Street”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“Somebody said, 'We are real only in moments of kindness'.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“THERE are times when this city seems actually to disapprove of people. In gloomy moments, I think we are allowed to stay alive here but not to live, much less to enjoy ourselves or take pleasure in what we see when we look out of our windows or walk around our streets. If we have the fortitude to get up out of bed in the morning and get going to face the day, we should also have the freedom to rejoice, and I think the freedom to rejoice is being denied us when our senses are dulled at every turn by streets that are inimical when they are not simply sad.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“Somebody said, 'We are real only in moments of kindness.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“but in our minds these stories remind us that we are always waiting, and remind us of what we are waiting for — a respite, a touch of grace, something simple that starts us wondering. I am reminded of Oliver Goldsmith, who said, two hundred years ago, “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“When the hauteur slipped from her face, what would I see? Despair, I imagine. Not the passive, withdrawn despair that keeps itself in silence but the raging kind that incinerates all before it.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker

“THERE are more parades in this city than any of us know about. There was one yesterday that went unwitnessed and unadmired except by two policemen and me, and it was a real parade, with marching men, all in line and all in step, and martial music.”
― Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker