The Nobel Prize is fine, but the drugs I've developed are rewards in themselves.

- Gertrude B. Elion

Nobody . . . took me seriously. They wondered why in the world I wanted to be a chemist when no women were doing that. The world was not waiting for …

- Gertrude B. Elion

People ask me often [whether] the Nobel Prize [was] the thing you were aiming for all your life, and I say that would be crazy. Nobody would aim for …

- Gertrude B. Elion

I had no specific bent towards science until my grandfather, who died - that summer - of stomach cancer. ... I decided that nobody should suffer tha…

- Gertrude B. Elion

Don't be afraid of hard work. Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Don't let others discourage you or tell you that you can't do it. In my day I was told…

- Gertrude B. Elion

I think it's a very valuable thing for a doctor to learn how to do research, to learn how to approach research, something there isn't time to teach t…

- Gertrude B. Elion

That was the turning point. It was as though the signal was there, 'This is the disease you're going to have to work against.' I never really stopped…

- Gertrude B. Elion

Maybe I was young and 'cute' (after all, I was only twenty then), but I've learned over the years that when you put white lab coats on chemists, they…

- Gertrude B. Elion

I had fallen in love with a young man... and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis... Two years later …

- Gertrude B. Elion