My Fair Lady
21 quotes
Biography
My Fair Lady is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story, based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and on the 1938 film adaptation of the play, concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady.
"I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night, and still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings and done a thousand things I've never done before."
"Women are irrational, that's all there is to that! Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags! They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!"
"Damn, damn, damn, DAMN! ... I've grown accustomed to her face!"
"Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs are second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in."
"Poor Eliza! How simply frightful! How humiliating! How delightful!"
"Them 'as pinched it, done her in! (1:29:17)"
"Them she lived with would have done her in for a hatpin let alone a hat."
"Not her, gin was mother's milk to her."
"Here, what are you sniggering at? (1:30:08)"
"Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin' arse! (1:31:18)"
"The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated."
"I sold flowers; I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else."
"You dear friend who talks so well, you can go to Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire!"
"All I want is 'Enry 'Iggins' 'ead."
"She's so deliciously low, so horribly dirty!"
"Eliza, you are to stay here for the next six months learning to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist's shop. At the end of six months you will be taken to an embassy ball in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the king finds out you are not a lady, you will be taken to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls! If you are not found out, you shall be given a present of... uh... seven and six to start life within a lady's shop. If you refuse this offer, you will be the most ungrateful, wicked girl, and the angels will weep for you."
"I find the moment that a woman makes friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance. And I find the moment that I make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. So here I am – a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so."
"It's about filling up the deepest cut that separates class from class and soul from soul."
"Damn Mrs Pearce, damn the coffee, and damn you! And damn my own folly for having lavished my hard-earned knowledge, and the treasure of my regard and intimacy, on a heartless guttersnipe!"
"If the Higgins oxygen burns up her little lungs, let her seek some stuffiness that suits her! She's an owl sickened by a few days of my sunshine! Very well, let her go - I can do without her. I can do without anyone! I have my own soul, my own spark of divine fire!"
"Eliza? Where the devil are my slippers?"