These words are spoken in the novel by Jane Eyre’s
doomed but serene childhood friend, Helen Burns—played, in the 1943 screen
adaptation, by 11-year-old Elizabeth Taylor (on the right in the attached
image, with Peggy Ann Garner as the young Jane Eyre).
“My grudges come in all sizes and flavors: there are
the mild ones (failure to return calls, to RSVP, or to send a thank-you note
for the hand- knit baby sweater with the hand-blown buttons); the ancient
grudges (mean boys and idiot bosses); the vanquished grudges (wrote a letter,
filed a grievance, called the mother); the consumer grudges (I've never
returned to the chichi kitchen boutique whose snobby owner was so rude to Aunt
Hattie, age eighty-eight, just because she asked if they carried Salad
Shooters); the noble grudges (against bigots, anti-Semites, and bullies); the
social grudges (rudeness, cluelessness, knowingly seating me at a terrible
table at a reception); grudges once removed (against total strangers who have
been mean to my friends either in person or via a book review); defunct grudges
(against the dead, such as my first-grade teacher, who made the entire class
take their seats when meek me accidentally bumped into the window, bumped into
a window, causing the shade to fly up during an indoor, rainy-day recess).”—
Elinor
Lipman, “Good Grudgekeeping,” in I Can’t Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays (2013)
