I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.
It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.
People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it’s process.
..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination.
It’s very silly,” she said, “but I go on with it in spite of myself. I’m afraid I’m too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can’t read it.
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma
If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we’ll wake up to find our work done because we’ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!
Our relation, all round, exists–it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it
I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.
What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.
I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.
They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.
I never did anything in life to anyone’s imagination.
Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.
Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation.
The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her.
Cats and monkeys – monkeys and cats – all human life is there!
It has not been a successful life.”No — it has only been a beautiful one.
He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever.
He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.
Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.
She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
Don’t question your conscience so much–it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong.
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.
She couldn’t have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn’t, simply from a sense that one had to say something.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.
True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one’s self but the point is not only to get out you must stay out and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Live all you can it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?
True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one’s self. But the point is not only to get out you must stay out. And to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Cats and monkeys – monkeys and cats – all human life is there.
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy … what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy … what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.
I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
However British you may be, I am more British still.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.