Elizabeth Bibesco

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

Sourced

• My soul has gained the freedom of the night.
  • Poems (1928) Last line of the last poem in this collection, used as her epitaph.

• Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words?
  • Haven (1951)

Haven (1951)

• 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.

About 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

• 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

• A brilliant woman whose perpetual wit made my head swim.
  • David Low

• Miss Asquith, who was probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries ... looked like a lovely figure in an Italian fresco.
  • Marcel Proust

• She is pasty and podgy, with the eyes of a currant bun, suddenly protruding with animation.
  • Virginia Woolf