Quotessence
Home / Books / An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir

Book by Lillian Hellman · 9 quotes · Books, Dashiell Hammett, Death

Filter quotes by topic

AllBooksDashiell HammettDeathFranceAdultsAmericaAuthorsBrillianceChallengesChangeChildhoodCompanyComplicationsConfrontationDifficultiesDyingEnglandFashionFriendsHeaviness

An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir Quotes

“Most people coming out of a war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself, your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort, at the least, and death at the other end, ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes, for a time, all others seem alien and frivolous. Friends are glad to see you again, but you know immediately that most of them have put you to one side, and while it is easy enough to say that you should have known that before, most of us don't, and it is painful. You are face to face with what will happen to you after death.”

WarDeathChangeFriendsConfrontationPost War
Book:An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
Create image

“I think I meant an intimation of sadness, a first recognition that there was so much to understand that one might never find one's way and the first signs, perhaps, that for a nature like mine, the way would not be easy. I cannot be sure that I felt all that then, although I can be sure that it was in the fig tree, a few years later, that I was first puzzled by the conflict which would haunt me, harm me, and benefit me the rest of my life: simply, the stubborn, relentless, driving desire to be alone as it came into conflict with the desire not to be alone when I wanted not to be.”

LifeCompanySadnessSolitudeDifficultiesComplications
Book:An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
Create image

“It was in that tree that I learned to read, filled with the passions that can only come to the bookish, grasping, very young, bewildered by almost all of what I read, sweating in the attempt to understand a world of adults I fled from in real life but desperately wanted to join in books. (I did not connect the grown men and women in literature with the grown men and women I saw around me. They were, to me, another species.)”

ReadingLiteratureUnderstandingChildhoodBooksAdults
Book:An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir
Create image