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Experience Was To Be Taken As Showing That One Might Get A Five-pound Note As One Got A Light For A Cigarette; But One Had To Check The Friendly Impulse To Ask For It In The Same Way.

-Henry James

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Experience Was To Be

Henry James

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Experience Was To Be Taken As Showing That One Might Get A Five-pound Note As One Got A Light For A Cigarette; But One Had To Check The Friendly Impulse To Ask For It In The Same Way.

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It's Never Permitted To Be Surprised At The Aberrations Of Born Fools.

A Solitary Maple On A Woodside Flames In Single Scarlet, Recalls Nothing So Much As The Daughter Of A Noble House Dressed For A Fancy Ball, With The Whole Family Gathered Around To Admire Her Before She Goes.

...the Great Merit Of The Place Is That One Can Arrange One's Life Here Exactly As One Pleases...there Are Facilities For Every Kind Of Habit And Taste, And Everything Is Accepted And Understood.

New York Is Appalling, Fantastically Charmless And Elaborately Dire.

It Was The Way The Autumn Day Looked Into The High Windows As It Waned; The Way The Red Light, Breaking At The Close From Under A Low Sombre Sky, Reached Out In A Long Shaft And Played Over Old Wainscots, Old Tapestry, Old Gold, Old Colour.

Experience Was To Be Taken As Showing That One Might Get A Five-pound Note As One Got A Light For A Cigarette; But One Had To Check The Friendly Impulse To Ask For It In The Same Way.

Deep Experience Is Never Peaceful.

However British You May Be, I Am More British Still.

There Are Two Kinds Of Taste, The Taste For Emotions Of Surprise And The Taste For Emotions Of Recognition.

I Recall My Fleeting Instants In Savannah As The Taste Of A Cup Charged To The Brim.

I Had An Excellent Repast - The Best Repast Possible - Which Consisted Simply Of Boiled Eggs And Bread And Butter. It Was The Quality Of These Simple Ingredients That Made The Occasion Memorable. The Eggs Were So Good That I Am Ashamed To Say How Many Of Them I Consumed ....it Might Seem That An Egg Which Has Succeeded In Being Fresh Has Done All That Can Be Reasonably Expected Of It.

The Faculty Of Attention Has Utterly Vanished From The Anglo-saxon Mind, Extinguished At Its Source By The Big Bayad?re Of Journalism, Of The Newspaper And The Picture Magazine Which Keeps Screaming, "look At Me." Illustrations, Loud Simplifications... Bill Poster Advertising ? Only These Stand A Chance.

The Black And Merciless Things That Are Behind The Great Possessions.

Art Is Nothing More Than The Shadow Of Humanity.

Inspirational Running

People Can Be In General Pretty Well Trusted, Of Course--with The Clock Of Their Freedom Ticking As Loud As It Seems To Do Here--to Keep An Eye On The Fleeting Hour.

Art Without Life Is A Poor Affair.

Oxford Lends Sweetness To Labour And Dignity To Leisure.

Nothing, Of Course, Will Ever Take The Place Of The Good Old Fashion Of 'liking' A Work Of Art Or Not Liking It; The More Improved Criticism Will Not Abolish That Primitive, That Ultimate, Test.

A Swift Carriage, Of A Dark Night, Rattling With Four Horses Over Roads That One Can’t See--that’s My Idea Of Happiness.

I Intend To Judge Things For Myself; To Judge Wrongly, I Think, Is More Honorable Than Not To Judge At All.

The Historian, Essentially, Wants More Documents Than He Can Really Use; The Dramatist Only Wants More Liberties Than He Can Really Take.

I Call People Rich When They're Able To Meet The Requirements Of Their Imagination.

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.

The Artist Is Present In Every Page Of Every Book From Which He Sought So Assiduously To Eliminate Himself.

The Women One Meets - What Are They But Books One Has Already Read? You're A Library Of The Unknown, The Uncut. Upon My Word I've A Subscription.

I Ought To Tell You That I'm Probably Your Cousin.

Things Are Always Different From What They Might Be.

Keep Making The Movements Of Life.

You Wanted To Look At Life For Yourself - But You Were Not Allowed; You Were Punished For Your Wish. You Were Ground In The Very Mill Of The Conventional.

Most English Talk Is A Quadrille In A Sentry-box.

Her Reputation For Reading A Great Deal Hung About Her Like The Cloudy Envelope Of A Goddess In An Epic.

No Themes Are So Human As Those That Reflect For Us, Out Of The Confusion Of Life, The Close Connection Of Bliss And Bale, Of The Things That Help With The Things That Hurt, So Dangling Before Us Forever That Bright Hard Medal, Of So Strange An Alloy, One Face Of Which Is Somebody's Right And Ease And The Other Somebody's Pain And Wrong.

Live As You Like Best, And Your Character Will Take Care Of Itself. Most Things Are Good For You; The Exceptions Are Very Rare.

In The Long Run An Opinion Often Borrows Credit From The Forbearance Of Its Patrons.

Always Keep A Window In The Attic Open; Not Just Cracked: Open.

Novelist-citizen Of Two Countries Interpreter Of His Generation On Both Sides Of The Sea.

The Practice Of "reviewing"... In General Has Nothing In Common With The Art Of Criticism.

I Mean That Everything This Afternoon Has Been Too Beautiful, And That Perhaps Everything Together Will Never Be So Right Again. I'm Very Glad Therefore You've Been A Part Of It.

Life Is A Predicament Which Precedes Death.

No, No—there Are Depths, Depths! The More I Go Over It, The More I See In It, And The More I See In It, The More I Fear. I Don’t Know What I Don’t See—what I Don’t Fear!

The Girl Had A Certain Nobleness Of Imagination, Which Rendered Her A Good Many Services And Played Her A Great Many Tricks. She Spent Half Her Time In Thinking Of Beauty, Bravery, Magnanimity; She Had A Fixed Determination To Regard The World As A Place Of Brightness, Of Free Expansion, Of Irresistible Action, She Thought It Would Be Detestable To Be Afraid Or Ashamed. She Had An Infinite Hope That She Would Never Do Anything Wrong. She Had Resented So Strongly, After Discovering Them, Her Mere Errors Of Feeling.

Don't Pass It By - The Immediate, The Real, The Ours, The Yours, The Novelist's That It Waits For.

The Only Obligation To Which In Advance We May Hold A Novel, Without Incurring The Accusation Of Being Arbitrary, Is That It Be Interesting.

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?

Congratulations

Writing Is Not Primarily Escape, But Use.

There Were Always People To Snatch At You, And It Would Never Occur To Them That They Were Eating You Up. They Did That Without Tasting.

To Say That She Had A Book Is To Say That Her Solitude Did Not Press Upon Her; For Her Love Of Knowledge Had A Fertilizing Quality And Her Imagination Was Strong. There Was At This Time, However, A Want Of Lightness In Her Situation, Which The Arrival Of An Unexpected Visitor Did Much To Dispel.

Every Good Story Is Of Course Both A Picture And An Idea, And The More They Are Interfused The Better.

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!

It Takes An Endless Amount Of History To Make Even A Little Tradition.

I Am Blackly Bored When They Are At Large And At Work; But Somehow I Am Still More Blackly Bored When They Are Shut Up In Holloway And We Are Deprived Of Them.

Be Generous, Be Delicate, And Always Pursue The Prize.

Art Requires, Above All Things, A Suppression Of Self, A Subordination Of One's Self To An Idea.

Any Point Of View Is Interesting That Is A Direct Impression Of Life. You Each Have An Impression Colored By Your Individual Conditions; Make That Into A Picture, A Picture Framed By Your Own Personal Wisdom, Your Glimpse Of The American World.

One Can't Judge Till One's Forty; Before That We're Too Eager, Too Hard, Too Cruel, And In Addition Much Too Ignorant.

...the Peculiar Air Of Oxford-the Air Of Liberty To Care For The Things Of The Mind Assured And Secured By Machinery Which Is In Itself A Satisfaction To Sense.

You Seemed To Me To Be Soaring Far Up In The Blue - To Be Sailing In The Bright Light, Over The Heads Of Men. Suddenly Some One Tosses Up A Faded Rosebud - A Missile That Should Never Have Reached You - And Down You Drop To The Ground.

The Power To Guess The Unseen From The Seen, To Trace The Implications Of Things, To Judge The Whole Piece By The Pattern . . . This Cluster Of Gifts May Almost Be Said To Constitute Experience.

... Since She Might Not Be Splendid, She Would At Least Be Immaculate.

The Girl Had A Certain Nobleness Of Imagination, Which Rendered Her A Good Many Services And Played Her A Great Many Tricks.

It Is Altogether An Extraordinary Growing, Swarming, Glittering, Pushing, Chattering, Good-natured, Cosmopolitan Place, And Perhaps In Some Ways The Best Imitation Of Paris That Can Be Found (with A Great Originality Of Its Own).

We Must Grant The Artist His Subject, His Idea, His Donn´e: Our Criticism Is Applied Only To What He Makes Of It.

Adjectives Are The Sugar Of Literature And Adverbs The Salt.

I Think Patriotism Is Like Charity -- It Begins At Home.

We Are Divided Of Course Between Liking To Feel The Past Strange And Liking To Feel It Familiar.

Do You Think It Is Better To Be Clever Than To Be Good?” “good For What?” Asked The Doctor. “you Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

He Was There Or Was Not There: Not There If I Didn't See Him.

A Man Who Pretends To Understand Women Is Bad Manners. For Him To Really To Understand Them Is Bad Morals.

What Is Character But The Determination Of Incident? What Is Incident But The Illustration Of Character?

Of Course You're Always At Liberty To Judge The Critic. Judge People As Critics, However, And You'll Condemn Them All!

Cats And Monkeys; Monkeys And Cats; All Human Life Is There.

You Think Too Much.' 'i Suppose I Do; But I Can’t Help It, My Mind Is So Terribly Active. When I Give Myself, I Give Myself. I Pay The Penalty In My Headaches, My Famous Headaches--a Perfect Circlet Of Pain! But I Carry It As A Queen Carries Her Crown.

I've Struck Up A Tremendous Intimacy With Conte Alberto, And We Literally Can't Live Without Each Other. He Is The First Object My Eyes Greet In The Morning, And The Last At Night.

The Only Reason For The Existence Of A Novel Is That It Does Attempt To Represent Life.

Autobiography May Be The Preeminent Kind Of American Expression.

Try To Be One Of The People On Whom Nothing Is Lost!

Life Being All Inclusion And Confusion, And Art Being All Discrimination And Selection, The Latter, In Search Of The Hard Latent Value With Which It Alone Is Concerned, Sniffs Round The Mass As Instinctively And Unerringly As A Dog Suspicious Of Some Buried Bone.

He Is Outside Of Everything, And Alien Everywhere. He Is An Aesthetic Solitary. His Beautiful, Light Imagination Is The Wing That On The Autumn Evening Just Brushes The Dusky Window.

We Care What Happens To People Only In Proportion As We Know What People Are.

A Tradition Is Kept Alive Only By Something Being Added To It.

The Fatal Futility Of Fact.

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.

My Idea Is This, That When You Only Love A Little You're Naturally Not Jealous — Or Are Only Jealous Also A Little, So That It Doesn't Matter. But When You Love In A Deeper And Intenser Way, Then You're In The Very Same Proportion Jealous; Your Jealousy Has Intensity And, No Doubt, Ferocity.

The Deepest Quality Of A Work Of Art Will Always Be The Quality Of The Mind Of The Producer...no Good Novel Will Ever Proceed From A Superficial Mind.

Women Never Dine Alone. When They Dine Alone They Don't Dine.

London Doesn't Love The Latent Or The Lurking, Has Neither Time, Nor Taste, Nor Sense For Anything Less Discernible Than The Red Flag In Front Of The Steam-roller. It Wants Cash Over The Counter And Letters Ten Feet High.

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.

If The Artist Is Necessarily Sensitive, Does That Sensitiveness Form In Its Essence A State Constantly Liable To Shade Off Into The Morbid? Does This Liability, Moreover, Increase In Proportion As The Effort Is Great And The Ambition Intense?

All Roads Lead To Rome, And There Were Times When It Might Have Struck Us That Almost Every Branch Of Study Or Subject Of Conversation Skirted Forbidden Ground.

The Power To Guess The Unseen From The Seen, To Trace The Implication Of Things, To Judge The Whole Piece By The Pattern, The Condition Of Feeling Life, In General, So Completely That You Are Well On Your Way To Knowing Any Particular Corner Of It-this Cluster Of Gifts May Almost Be Said To Constitute Experience, And They Occur In Country And In Town, And In The Most Differing Stages Of Education.

If One Is Strong, One Loves The More Strongly.

To Criticize Is To Appreciate, To Appropriate, To Take Intellectual Possession, To Establish In Fine A Relation With The Criticized Thing And To Make It One's Own.

There Are Moods In Which One Feels The Impulse To Enter A Tacit Protest Against Too Gross An Appetite For Pure Aesthetics In This Starving And Sinning World. One Turns Half Away, Musingly, From Certain Beautiful Useless Things.

It Is Difficult To Speak Adequately Or Justly Of London. It Is Not A Pleasant Place; It Is Not Agreeable, Or Cheerful, Or Easy, Or Exempt From Reproach. It Is Only Magnificent.

The Visible World Is But Man Turned Inside Out That He May Be Revealed To Himself.

Until You Try, You Don't Know What You Can't Do.

Summer Afternoon, Summer Afternoon; To Me Those Have Always Been The Two Most Beautiful Words In The English Language.

It's A Complex Fate, Being An American, And One Of The Responsibilities It Entails Is Fighting Against A Superstitious Valuation Of Europe.

You Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

It's Time To Start Living The Life You've Imagined.

There's No More Usual Basis Of Union Than Mutual Misunderstanding.

I Could Come Back To America..to Die..but Never, Never To Live.

I Always Want To Know The Things One Shouldn't Do." "so As To Do Them?" Asked Her Aunt. "so As To Choose." Said Isabel

The Effort Really To See And Really To Represent Is No Idle Business In Face Of The Constant Force That Makes For Muddlement. The Great Thing Is Indeed That The Muddled State Too Is One Of The Very Sharpest Of The Realities, That It Also Has Color And Form And Character, Has Often In Fact A Broad And Rich Comicality.

In Art Economy Is Always Beauty.

Don’t Underestimate The Value Of Irony—it Is Extremely Valuable.

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.

Things Are Always Different Than What They Might Be...if You Wait For Them To Change, You Will Never Do Anything.

Art Does Not Lie In Copying Nature.- Nature Furnishes The Material By Means Of Which Is To Express A Beauty Still Unexpressed In Nature.-the Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Is Conscious Of.

Which Of You With Taking Thought Can Add To His Stature One Cubit?

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.

I Hold Any Writer Sufficiently Justified Who Is Himself In Love With His Theme.

If This Was Love, Love Had Been Overrated.

I Would Give All I Possess To Get Out Of Myself; But Somehow, At The End, I Find Myself So Vastly More Interesting Than Nine Tenths Of The People I Meet.

It Is Indeed Immensely Picturesque. I Can Fancy Sitting All A Summer's Day Watching Its Shadows Shorten And Lengthen Again, And Drawing A Delicious Contrast Between The World's Duration And The Feeble Span Of Individual Experience. There Is Something In Stonehenge Almost Reassuring; And If You Are Disposed To Feel That Life Is Rather A Superficial Matter, And That We Soon Get To The Bottom Of Things, The Immemorial Gray Pillars May Serve To Remind You Of The Enormous Background Of Time.

One Is Oneself A Fine Consequence.

To Live Only To Suffer—only To Feel The Injury Of Life Repeated And Enlarged—it Seemed To Her She Was Too Valuable, Too Capable, For That. Then She Wondered If It Were Vain And Stupid To Think So Well Of Herself. When Had It Even Been A Guarantee To Be Valuable? Wasn't All History Full Of The Destruction Of Precious Things? Wasn't It Much More Probable That If One Were Fine One Would Suffer?

To Live In The World Of Creation-to Get Into It And Stay In It-to Frequent It And Haunt It...to Think Intently And Fruitfully, To Woo Combinations And Inspirations Into Being By A Depth And Continuity Of Attention And Meditation-this Is The Only Thing.

My Sole Wish Is To Frustrate As Utterly As Possible The Post-mortem Exploiter.

It Takes A Great Deal Of History To Produce A Little Literature.

My Father Ain't In Europe; My Father's In A Better Place Than Europe." Winterbourne Imagined For A Moment That This Was The Manner In Which The Child Had Been Taught To Intimate That Mr. Miller Had Been Removed To The Sphere Of Celestial Reward. But Randolph Immediately Added, "my Father's In Schenectady.

Do Not Mind Anything That Anyone Tells You About Anyone Else. Judge Everyone And Everything For Yourself.

She Feels In Italics And Thinks In Capitals.

Young Men Of This Class Never Do Anything For Themselves That They Can Get Other People To Do For Them, And It Is The Infatuation, The Devotion, The Superstition Of Others That Keeps Them Going. These Others In Ninety-nine Cases Out Of A Hundred Are Women.

I Have Only To Let Myself Go! So I Have Said All My Life, Yet I Have Never Fully Done It.

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 Favor Of Doing It.

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.

The Story Had Held Us, Round The Fire, Sufficiently Breathless, But Except The Obvious Remark That It Was Gruesome, As, On Christmas Eve In An Old House, A Strange Tale Should Essentially Be . . .

There Are Women Who Are For All Your 'times Of Life.' They're The Most Wonderful Sort.

To Believe In A Child Is To Believe In The Future.

[thomas Henry] Huxley Is A Very Genial, Comfortable Being-yet With None Of The Noisy And Windy Geniality Of Some Folks Here, Whom You Find With Their Backs Turned When You Are Responding To The Remarks That They Have Made You.

Money's A Horrid Thing To Follow, But A Charming Thing To Meet.

One Might Enumerate The Items Of High Civilization, As It Exists In Other Countries, Which Are Absent From The Texture Of American Life, Until It Should Become A Wonder To Know What Was Left.

Every Governmental Institution Has Been A Standing Testimony To The Harmonic Destiny Of Society, A Standing Proof That The Life Of Man Is Destined For Peace And Amity, Instead Of Disorder And Contention.

In Museums And Palaces We Are Alternate Radicals And Conservatives.

Little By Little, Even With Other Cares, The Slowly But Surely Working Poison Of The Garden-mania Begins To Stir In My Long-sluggish Veins.

We Must Know, As Much As Possible, In Our Beautiful Art...what We Are Talking About And The Only Way To Know Is To Have Lived And Loved And Cursed And Floundered And Enjoyed And Suffered. I Think I Don't Regret A Single "excess" Of My Responsive Youth I Only Regret, In My Chilled Age, Certain Occasions And Possibilities I Didn't Embrace.

I Have Performed The Necessary Butchery. Here Is The Bleeding Corpse.

She Was A Woman Who, Between Courses, Could Be Graceful With Her Elbows On The Table.

If You Are Going To Be Pushed You Had Better Jump

Though It Might Have Its Momentary Alarms, Paternity Is Not An Exciting Vocation.

He Is The Same Old Sausage, Fizzing And Sputtering In His Own Grease.

The Face Of Nature And Civilization In This Our Country Is To A Certain Point A Very Sufficient Literary Field. But It Will Yield Its Secrets Only To A Really Grasping Imagination. To Write Well And Worthily Of American Things One Need Even More Than Elsewhere To Be A Master.

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 Image Of The Presence, Whatever It Was, Waiting There For Him To Go -this Image Had Not Yet Been So Concrete For His Nerves As When He Stopped Short Of The Point At Which Certainty Would Have Come To Him. For, With All His Resolution, Or More Exactly With All His Dread, He Did Stop Short - He Hung Back From Really Seeing. The Risk Was Too Great And His Fear Too Definite: It Took At This Moment An Awful Specific Form.

Kidd, Turn Off The Light To Spare My Blushes.

Art Is A Point Of View, And A Genius Way Of Looking At Things.

I've Always Expected The Worst, And It's Always Worse Than I Expected.

God's Creature Is One. He Makes Man, Not Men. His True Creature Is Unitary And Infinite, Revealing Himself, Indeed, In Every Finite Form, But Compromised By None.

The Superiority Of One Man's Opinion Over Another's Is Never So Great As When The Opinion Is About A Woman.

The Critical Sense Is So Far From Frequent That It Is Absolutely Rare, And The Possession Of The Cluster Of Qualities That Minister To It Is One Of The Highest Distinctions... In This Light One Sees The Critic As The Real Helper Of The Artist, A Torchbearing Outrider, The Interpreter, The Brother... Just In Proportion As He Is Sentient And Restless, Just In Proportion As He Reacts And Reciprocates And Penetrates, Is The Critic A Valuable Instrument.

It Might Seem That An Egg Which Has Succeeded In Being Fresh Has Done All That Can Reasonably Be Expected Of It.

Ideas Are, In Truth, Forces. Infinite, Too, Is The Power Of Personality. A Union Of The Two Always Makes History.

The "germ," Wherever Gathered, Has Ever Been For Me, "the Germ Of A Story," And Most Of The Stories Strained To Shape Under My Hand Have Sprung From A Single Small Seed, A Seed As Remote And Windblown As A Casual Hint.

His Kiss Was Like White Lightning, A Flash That Spread, And Spread Again, And Stayed.

The House Of Fiction Has In Short Not One Window, But A Million, ... But They Are, Singly, As Nothing Without The Posted Presence Of The Watcher.

It Exhibits The Effort Of An Essentially Prosaic Mind To Lift Itself, By A Prolonged Muscular Strain, Into Poetry.

One Doesn't Defend One's God: One's God Is In Himself A Defense.

It Is Art That Makes Life, Makes Interest, Makes Importance, For Our Consideration And Application Of These Things, And I Know Of No Substitute Whatever For The Force And Beauty Of Its Process.

Make Him [the Reader] Think The Evil, Make Him Think It For Himself, And You Are Released From Weak Specifications.

If You Haven't Had Your Life What Have You Had?

Sometimes She Went So Far As To Wish That She Should Find Herself In A Difficult Position, So That She Might Have The Pleasure Of Being As Heroic As The Occasion Demanded.

He Valued Life And Literature Equally For The Light They Threw Upon Each Other; To His Mind One Implied The Other; He Was Unable To Conceive Of Them Apart.

It Doesn't So Much Matter What You Do In Particular, So Long As You Have Your Life.

We Work In The Dark -- We Do What We Can -- We Give What We Have.

I Know Of No Substitute Whatever For The Force And Beauty Of An Artistic Process.

All The Same Don't Forget That You're Young — Blessedly Young; Be Glad Of It On The Contrary And Live Up To It. 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.

No Sovereign, No Court, No Personal Loyalty, No Aristocracy, No Church, No Clergy, No Army, No Diplomatic Service, No Country Gentlemen, No Palaces, No Castles, Nor Manors, Nor Old Country-houses, Nor Parsonages, Nor Thatched Cottages Nor Ivied Ruins No Cathedrals, Nor Abbeys, Nor Little Norman Churches No Great Universities Nor Public Schools -- No Oxford, Nor Eton, Nor Harrow No Literature, No Novels, No Museums, No Pictures, No Political Society, No Sporting Class -- No Epsom Nor Ascot Some Such List As That Might Be Drawn Up Of The Absent Things In American Life.

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.

Innocent And Infinite Are The Pleasures Of Observation.

I Adore Adverbs; They Are The Only Qualifications I Really Much Respect.

Am I Solemn? I Had An Idea I Was Grinning From Ear To Ear." "you Look As If You Were Taking Me To A Prayer-meeting Or A Funeral. If That's A Grin Your Ears Are Very Near Together." "should You Like Me To Dance A Hornpipe On The Deck?" "pray Do, And I'll Carry Round Your Hat. It'll Pay The Expenses Of Our Journey.

London Is On The Whole The Most Possible Form Of Life.

Everything About Florence Seems To Be Colored With A Mild Violet, Like Diluted Wine.

She Had An Immense Curiosity About Life, And Was Constantly Staring And Wondering.

Instead Of Leading To The High Places Of Happiness, From Which The World Would Seem To Lie Below One, So That One Could Look Down With A Sense Of Exaltation And Advantage, And Judge And Choose And Pity, It Led Rather Downward And Earthward, Into Realms Of Restriction And Depression, Where The Sound Of Other Lives, Easier And Freer, Was Heard As From Above, And Served To Deepen The Feeling Of Failure.

The Effect, If Not The Prime Office, Of Criticism Is To Make Our Absorption And Our Enjoyment Of The Things That Feed The Mind As Aware Of Itself As Possible, Since That Awareness Quickens The Mental Demand, Which Thus In Turn Wanders Further And Further For Pasture. This Action On The Part Of The Mind Practically Amounts To A Reaching Out For The Reasons Of Its Interest, As Only By Its Ascertaining Them Can The Interest Grow More Various. This Is The Very Education Of Our Imaginative Life.

Americans Will Eat Garbage Provided You Sprinkle It Liberally With Ketchup.

The Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Nature Is Conscious Of.

...he Had Long Decided That Abundant Laughter Should Be The Embellishment Of The Remainder Of His Days.

We Trust To Novels To Train Us In The Practice Of Great Indignations And Great Generosity.

It Is, I Think, An Indisputable Fact That Americans Are, As Americans, The Most Self-conscious People In The World, And The Most Addicted To The Belief That The Other Nations Of The Earth Are In A Conspiracy To Under Value Them.

One Of My Latest Sensations Was Going To Lady Airlie's To Hear Browning Read His Own Poems - With The Comport Of Finding That, At Least, If You Don't Understand Them, He Himself Apparently Understands Them Even Less. He Read Them As If He Hated Them And Would Like To Bite Them To Pieces.

Experience Is Never Limited, And It Is Never Complete

Never Say You Know The Last Word About Any Human Heart.

Really, Universally, Relations Stop Nowhere, And The Exquisite Problem Of The Artist Is Eternally But To Draw, By A Geometry Of His Own, The Circle Within Which They Shall Happily Appear To Do So.

And Remember This, That If You've Been Hated, You've Also Been Loved.

The Advantage, The Luxury, As Well As The Torment And Responsibility Of The Novelist, Is That There Is No Limit To What He May Attempt As An Executant - No Limit To His Possible Experiments, Efforts, Discoveries, Successes.

Excellence Does Not Require Perfection.

I Think I Don't Regret A Single 'excess' Of My Responsive Youth - I Only Regret, In My Chilled Age, Certain Occasions And Possibilities I Didn't Embrace.

Make The Short Story Tremendously Succinct - With A Very Short Pulse Or Rhythm - And The Closest Selection Of Detail - In Other Words Summarise Intensely And Deeply And Keep Down The Lateral Development. It Should Be A Little Gem Of Bright, Quick, Vivid Form

I Don't Care About Anything But You, And That's Enough For The Present. I Want You To Be Happy--not To Think Of Anything Sad; Only To Feel That I'm Near You And I Love You. Why Should There Be Pain? In Such Hours As This What Have We To Do With Pain? That's Not The Deepest Thing; There's Something Deeper.

She Is Written In A Foreign Tongue.

In A Play, Certainly, The Subject Is Of More Importance Than In Any Other Work Of Art. Infelicity, Triviality, Vagueness Of Subject, May Be Outweighed In A Poem, A Novel, Or A Picture, By Charm Of Manner, By Ingenuity Of Execution; But In A Drama The Subject Is Of The Essence Of The Work-it Is The Work. If It Is Feeble, The Work Can Have No Force; If It Is Shapeless, The Work Must Be Amorphous.

To Kill A Human Being Is, After All, The Least Injury You Can Do Him.

If You Have Work To Do, Don't Wait To Feel Like It; Set To Work And You Will Feel Like It.

..her Smile, Which Was Her Pretty Feature, Was Never So Pretty As When Her Sprightly Phrase Had A Scratch Lurking In It.

Her Chief Dread In Life, At This Period Of Her Development, Was That She Would Appear Narrow Minded; What She Feared Next Afterwards Was That She Should Be So.

She Envied Ralph His Dying, For If One Were Thinking Of Rest That Was The Most Perfect Of All. To Cease Utterly, To Give It All Up And Not Know Anything More — This Idea Was As Sweet As The Vision Of A Cool Bath In A Marble Tank, In A Darkened Chamber, In A Hot Land.

It Is Art That Makes Life, Makes Interest, Makes Importance.

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