Alice Quotes

“My mother, although she had in a great part shifted the responsibility for me, tried all the same quite hard to do her duty by me. She would from time to time take me on visits to such of her friends as happened also to be afflicted with children.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“You see,’ Alice was very earnest, ‘if we’d lived in the slums and our mother had had fifteen children, and our father had got drunk and knocked us about, we should have been brought up against “real life.”’ ‘Daddy does drink—a bit.’ Anthony was hopeful. ‘It’s what makes him do card tricks after dinner.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Obviously that wasn’t how she thought of herself. She sought to do neither harm nor good. She was detached, intellectual and artistic. She read American books which had been banned in England and English books which had been banned in America.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Uncle Henry said he believed he had once seen the Judge at a levee and asked Cassius if he too was at the Bar. ‘No,’ said Cassius. ‘No, I do nothing at all.’ ‘Nothing?’ Uncle Henry, who had done nothing during the whole of his life, sounded shocked. ‘Nothing,’ Cassius repeated. He implied that it was enough that he should exist.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“She comes to tea with me at Gunter’s, just as usual, but our conversations are impersonal. Only she told me the other day that she was afraid the world would stop floating.’ ‘That’s Miss White,’ I said. ‘She’s my grandmother’s maid. When she used to cross the Atlantic she was always afraid that the liner would stop floating and sink to the bottom. Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn’t had suddenly altered.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I started to wander aimlessly about the house. Human nature was horrible, people altogether were horrible. I couldn’t be bothered with them. I was disenchanted with the world.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Geoffrey told us that he had been to a psycho-analyst. As a patient? We felt awkward and impressed; perhaps he was a lunatic, or perhaps he suffered in some of the same ways as the people in the case histories at the back of the book. We looked at him speculatively but didn’t like to ask.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“. . . and I had a cocktail,’ Alice said. I was impressed, and asked her if she had enjoyed it. ‘Well, truthfully, not very much,’ Alice admitted. ‘But we shall have to get used to them, you know.’ We both agreed about drinking being one of the things you had to do when you were grown up. Fortunately we already enjoyed smoking, so we wouldn’t have to bother about that.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Later the same afternoon she might try to explain Dunne’s Experiment with Time to me.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“To live in the world as not of the world,’ Alice said. ‘That always sounded so nice, as if one had a little world of one’s own floating about inside the big one.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“and the title of the picture was ‘The Deserted Garden.’ Alice had often said that it was one of the few pictures that she had ever really liked and I suppose somebody must have repeated the remark to Paul. The result was that Paul, who had painted the picture, gave it to Alice. Nothing is happening in the picture, but much has already happened and in it there is the promise, or the threat, of the future. The plaster peels from the walls, the glass is broken in the Gothic window, the green shutter falls forward. But nothing happens; the final decay of that window and of the garden beyond is not yet. It may be that the house will be restored, that the rank grass will be mown, that the flower-pot which lies on its side will be righted and the plant it contains will flourish.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I found myself with a medium-sized young man, with nice hands and nice eyes. I noticed that it was curious, the way one always thought of the Lawes friends as coming in sizes, as if they were pairs of gloves or something, and not people at all. The medium young man smiled at me.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“The Principal, Miss Hartley-Jones, said that she would be very pleased to have me as a pupil, and that she was sure I would be very happy with them. She mentioned that of course all her pupils were gentlewomen. I was beginning to wonder where really common people learned to type. Maybe they just picked it up for themselves.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“I wished I could go into a Convent and be a nun. In a Convent you wouldn’t have to think, or if you did, it would only be about God, and nothing awful would be happening to him. You wouldn’t have to worry about him, as you did about your friends.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Personally I never found anything about the servants squalid, but always most interesting. Besides, one learnt so much more about people when one was disagreeing with them, and compared with us the servants had unbelievably exciting lives. Their world was boundless, while ours was contained within such narrow limits.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Miss White thought it a pity that my poor grandmother should have to be bothered by having me to live in the house. She was understood to say that my coming out should be my mother’s affair, as was the case in other families. ‘Poor madam was not strong, nobody thought, and everybody expected her to do everything.’ At first I was genuinely worried by these remarks and the head-shakings that accompanied them. How terrible if I was to be the cause of my grandmother’s death! I thought about it a lot; eventually I decided that as my grandmother was only sixty-three, as strong as a horse and extremely fond of parties, she would probably survive— which she did.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“When Alice was eighteen and I was seventeen and a half we ‘came out.’ Alice’s family took a furnished house in Cadogan Gardens from which Mrs. Norton and Alice were to operate. Our campaign was conducted from Hill Street. Looking back on it, the whole business was an incredible performance. The basic idea was rational enough. When a girl reached marriageable age, she was introduced by her parents into adult society, where it was hoped she would meet her future husband.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Alice had been instructed by her mother and I by my grandmother to make friends with our fellow scholars. Conscientiously we did our best. By careful questioning during the holidays, it was usually found that we had managed to make friends with the wrong people. The right people, of course, were those whose parents were going to give dances for them when they came out.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Cousins imply aunts. If Cassius had been my cousin I could have said, ‘And how is Aunt Maude, Cousin Cassius.’ No, it was Geoffrey who was supposed to be my cousin, ‘And how is Aunt Eileen, Cousin Geoffrey?’ We all sat down. Perhaps if Aunt Eileen had existed she would have been my favourite aunt. It would be nice to have a favourite aunt, and another aunt whom everybody hated, and could talk about.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Of course she is.’ Sonia seemed quite cross. ‘Everybody knows the beautiful Mrs. Boswell; she’s an international figure.’ ‘Is she?’ I felt more and more doubtful. Could it be that my mother went in for all-in wrestling matches or boxing tournaments. ‘On my left the beautiful Mrs. Boswell from England, on my right Miss Something from Czechoslovakia.’ No, it wasn’t likely.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Then I remembered again that I wasn’t dead. I had fallen off, I had been made to look foolish in the eyes of a great many people, and at the end of it I wasn’t even going to have a funeral. As well as hating the groom I hated myself.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Alice, I remember, was reading a book about child psychology and she and Anthony were discussing whether or not they were leading a sheltered childhood. A sheltered childhood, according to the book, was almost invariably a great disadvantage in later life.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Platon was a gigantic house, which had been built by a Norton in the middle of the eighteenth century. When it was new, I suppose, the Nortons had had twenty or thirty servants and the house was possibly comfortable. Now it was very uncomfortable and there were six servants who had disappeared in it, as ferrets do in over-large rabbit warrens. One was apt not to notice that they were there at all.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Miss Dent’s other and perhaps even more easily exploitable subject of conversation was ‘The Prince of Wales,’ for whom, although she had never met him, she had a great affection. Once I had enquired if, in the event of ‘The Prince of Wales’ proposing to her, she would break off her engagement to ‘My Fiancé.’ I think it is to Miss Dent’s credit that she admitted that her choice would be ‘The Prince of Wales,’ but Alice thought it was very disloyal of her.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“Alice said that she thought my glasses would have been an awfully dull thing to be expelled for. ‘She expelled me after we’d had a midnight feast on the roof and I left a pickle jar where it blocked up one of the drains so that the roof leaked.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“It was one of the supposed advantages of Groom Place that we did not wear a uniform. Our personalities were thus given full scope to express themselves through the medium of our clothes. At least that was what it said in the prospectus, and more or less what my mother had said when she sent me to the school. But, as far as I was concerned, it didn’t work out like that. My clothes expressed nothing but Miss Partridge’s distaste for shopping and our mutual antagonism to each other. I longed for the stuffy anonymous blue serge and black stockings of my High School. There, there had been no nonsense about personality. But there was nothing I could do about it except pretend that I wasn’t wearing an apple-green stockinette dress. I didn’t like green and I didn’t like stockinette. It was hard to have to endure them both in one garment.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice

“My letters always ended like that, except when I added: ‘PS. I’m sorry that there doesn’t seem to be any news this week.’ The postscript was meant to imply that if only my mother would be a little patient she would soon receive a letter containing the news of a fire, a murder or a robbery. I should have welcomed any of these. They would have been something to put in my letters.”
― Elizabeth Eliot, Alice