Elizabeth Bibesco

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

Haven (1951)

 * Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words?


 * 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.


 * Perfect moments don't turn into half-hours.
 * Portrait of Caroline


 * My soul has gained the freedom of the night.
 * Poems (1928)

About Elizabeth 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