Elinor Wylie Quotes

Hide me from day's garish eye.

You could never hide yourself in these places - in Mies's Farnsworth house, for example. That was a mistake of Modernism. People need places to hide from each other, too. You need everything.

They can't find my house now because I keep it very quiet where I live.

You spend your whole life trying to get known and then you spend the rest of it hiding in the toilet.

I made myself into an envelope into which I could thrust my work deep, lick the flap, seal it from everybody.

I tend to have to just get away from it all, so it is nice when touring to be able to come home for a week or two and close the door and not really see anybody.

I am private.

I just love my privacy.

When I'm not working I try to stay out of the public eye as much as possible.

I don't know what impression you might have of the way I live. I live in a quiet place. I do not live as a hermit, though other people would prefer it if I did.

Having a home away from the media glare is important to world-class athletes.

I haven't had the whole 'famous' thing happen to me yet, and I hope I never will. I like to sneak away in the corners and hide a lot.

I just go in my back garden. It's the only place where people don't come and bother you.

The story of my life is about back entrances, side doors, secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won't bother me.

If I had to do it all over, I'd be more secluded about it.

I like to live in places that are kind of off in the cuts so people can't really find me even if they wanted to.

I just wanted to have a private life.

I don't want anybody to know anything about me.

Everyone has secrets, and I think some people flee from home - far from home - to try to keep those secrets.

I love to be a hermit.

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

Oh, why can't we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean flee to my lodge in the hills.

Blessed books—they’re a place to be alone, and no one else can come in.

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead