Justine O'neill

Just try to love a man — and he kills you. Just feel that you cannot live without someone — and he kills you.

To say yes, commit herself to him, and then have to watch him recoil when he found out the extent of her inadequacy? Unbearable! He would learn what she was really like, and the knowledge would kill his love for her. Unbearable to say yes, and end in being rebuffed for all time. Far better to do any rebuffing herself.

Don’t worry about it, sweetie. God was very good to you; he didn’t give you any brains. Believe me, it’s far more comfortable that way. You’ll never offer the Lords of Creation any competition.

It must be the demon of destructiveness in us, the impulse to poke the guts out of a fire. It only hastens the end. But what a beautiful end!

Perhaps no human being is equipped to judge which is worse; inchoate longing with its attendant restlessness and irritability, or specific desire with its willful drive to achieve the desire.

“No, Mum,” she said, the tears rolling down her skin, hot like molten metal. Who on earth ever said people most moved don’t weep? They don’t know anything about it.

As soon as I’ve got myself organized I’ll write again, tell you when to expect me.
In the meantime, remember that in my strange way I do love you.

I could have done with mother's beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It’s what you and your art can convince people the face is.

We only have so much to give, don’t we? And up there I’m not myself, or perhaps more correctly I’m a succession of selves. We must all be a profound mixture of selves, don’t you think? To me, acting is first and foremost intellect, and only after that, emotion. The one liberates the other, and polishes it. There’s so much more to it than simply crying or screaming or producing a convincing laugh. It’s wonderful, you know. Thinking myself into another self, someone I might have been, had the circumstances been there. That’s the secret. Not becoming someone else, but incorporating the role into me as if she was myself. And so she becomes me.

There is nothing pretty about grief.

“You wait and see, my lad,” she said, staring into her mirror and seeing his face instead of her own.“I’m going to make England your most important foreign affair, or my name isn’t Justine O’Neill.”