Elsa Maxwell Quotes

The joy of a party is the newness of people to each other, renewed strikingness of humanity. They love each other, to distraction. Really to distraction. Before they fall into conversation and separate. ... The strangeness, and the hopes aroused by strangeness, are illusions. Mirages arising wherever people gather expectantly together.

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

A wise man once said, 'The skill in attending a party is knowing when it's time to leave.'

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets, and a woman forgives but never forgets. That's how it is. That's why women aren't allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.

People fascinate the hell out of me. I never get tired of watching people, listening to people. The best part is not getting up in front of people but meeting people.

Now when I bore people at a party they think it's their fault.

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

I'm aware, as a sane person, that I'm not the best-looking guy in the world. I'm aware of it. But when I go into a party, I will walk out with your girlfriend.

Whenever I go out with other married couples, I like to bring along a single crackhead. Just to spice things up.

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.

I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

There is a pleasure in meeting the glance of a person whom we have lately laid under some obligations.

That's why I like the scenes where we're just in the kitchen having breakfast, because it's the interaction between people. The chaos.

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

From the very second that two people sat together around a fire in the forest, there was another human out there who felt better in the dark.

That which chiefly causes the failure of a dinner-party, is the running short--not of meat, nor yet of drink, but of conversation.

Gossip, public, private, social - to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests against it, blames and despises it; yet everybody does it, or at least encourages others in it: quite innocently, unconsciously, in such a small, harmless fashion - yet we do it. We must talk about something, and it is not all of us who can find a rational topic of conversation, or discuss it when found.

It is not done to let anybody be too happy. The moment two people seem to be enjoying one another's company, a good hostess introduces a third element or removes the first.

Did they find something wanting in you, Gemma, at the party? You didn’t speak too freely or behave…strangely?” I grew claws and bayed at the moon. I confessed that I eat the hearts of small children. I told them I like the French.

Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women's voices?

It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.

No man does right by a woman at a party.