Elizabeth Bibesco

Princess Elizabeth (Asquith) Bibesco (26 February 1897 – 7 April 1945) was an English writer and poet, active between 1921 and 1940. A final posthumous collection of her stories, poems and aphorisms was published under the title Haven in 1951.

Quotes

Haven (1951)

Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words?

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

Life more often teaches us how to perfect our weaknesses than how to develop our strengths.

Those we love are entitled to resent the allowances we make for them.

To be on a pedestal is to be in a corner.

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

It is easier to be generous than to be just.

Each play worth seeing should be watched a second time on the faces of the audience.

Winter draws what summer paints.

The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.

We learn nothing by being right.

We are bound to those we love by their imperfections — their perfections help us to explain them to others.

Our losses should frequently be put on the credit side.

To regret your sins of commission as much as your sins of omission is to prove yourself a most unworthy sinner.

Death is part of this life and not of the next.

Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.
- Portrait of Caroline

My soul has gained the freedom of the night.
- Poems (1928)

About Elizabeth Bibesco

I always felt a deep malaise in her — her writing and the fluctuations of her brilliant and esoteic conversation led her everywhere but to self-satisfaction.
- S. N. Behrman ^{[citation needed]}

Prince Antoine Bibesco, when asked (by her mother, Margot Asquith) why his wife didn't do more "good works", such as visiting a hospital, replied, "Dearest Margot, Elizabeth visits a hospital three times a week, with the result that the lame walk, the blind see, and the dumb would speak if they could get a word in edgeways."
- Anecdote about Antoine and Elizabeth Bibesco, mentioned in London's Secret History (1983) by Peter Bushell, p. 187

Princess Bibesco delighted in a semi-ideal world — a world which, though having a counterpart in her experience, was to a great extent brought into being by her own temperament and, one might say, flair.
- Elizabeth Bowen ^{[citation needed]}

A brilliant woman whose perpetual wit made my head swim.
- David Low ^{[citation needed]}

Miss Asquith, who was probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries … looked like a lovely figure in an Italian fresco.
- Marcel Proust ^{[citation needed]}

She is pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun, suddenly protruding with animation.
- Virginia Woolf ^{[citation needed]}

External links

Encyclopedic article on Elizabeth Bibesco on Wikipedia
Media related to Elizabeth Bibesco on Wikimedia Commons
Works related to Author:Elizabeth Bibesco on Wikisource
Works by Elizabeth Bibesco at Project Gutenberg