The Dud Avocado

I always expect people to behave much better than I do. When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous.

That's my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.

It's amazing how right you can be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.

The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!

It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.

The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?

Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.

What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.

I love you. If you hadn't existed I would have had to invent you.

Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I've suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

I don't always understand other people's motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don't mind. I don't always understand other people's motives.

I had no technique for dealing with him: only an overpowering, unnerving, irrational, chemical desire to be with him.

It's just that I know the world is so wide and full of people and exciting things that I just go crazy every day stuck in these institutions. I mean if I don't get started soon, how will I get the chance to sharpen my wits? It takes lots of training. You have to start very young.

It's amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don't know; it's only the people you do know who confuse you.

Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you, for restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

[T]he question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

No matter what you do you've got to try to do it well. Otherwise, it's unbearable.

That's the story of my life. Someone's behavior strikes me as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose.

Please forgive me, but I've never had to change my mind so often at such short notice in my whole life. It's quite breathtaking. You see, first I thought you wanted my body, then I thought you wanted my love, then my life even, happily-ever-after and all that sort of thing, and now it turns out it is merely my money. Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you.' ... For what?' ... For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.

I only did it,' I said, 'now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.

He tried to kiss me. One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl’s account o how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night. Only I had no flower.

I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase "mere child.

The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless.

Boy, this really wasn't one of his days. He just couldn't put a foot right. It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there. Only I'd never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating.

I remember a little later wondering why things always turn out to be diametrically opposed to what you expect them to be. It's no good even trying to predict what this opposite will be because it always fools you and turns out to be the opposite of that, if you see what I mean. If you think this is geometrically impossible all I can say is that you don't know my life

[T]wo Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over.

But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn't as if I were one of them or even competing with them, for heaven's sake, I was merely a disinterested spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.

I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, and crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.

I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.

As a matter of fact I'd had my hair dyed a marvelous shade of pale red so popular with Parisian tarts that season.