Clare Boothe Luce Quotes

I realized I've spent all my life creating a past.

I've always been sort of influenced by my male relationships and that period of my life when you start to cringe and be like, 'I can't believe I wore this or that.'

You live each rivalry in a different way.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

The French say that to part is to die a little. To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near.

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.

Sometimes I miss the old me.

When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.

The older I get the more things I gotta leave behind.

My father passed away before he saw me perform. I can't help but wonder what he would think of all this. I go to a job in full makeup.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

I'm not sure whether I've been happy. After my last book tour, I sat on my balcony with a cup of tea. I thought: 'You can't rewind the movie. I've spent more than half my life in the Middle East. There have been great moments of horror and depression and loneliness.'

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

You've got to have baddies that you can boo.

To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

Enemies are so stimulating.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

I do sometimes look back at things I've written in the past, and think, 'I just don't remember being the person who wrote that.'

I have had a lot of adversaries in my political life, but no enemies that I can remember.

Friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

I thoroughly object to getting old. If you could let me be 16 again, I'd give you everything I've got and everything I'll ever have.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.