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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.

-Henry James

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To Take What There

Henry James

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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.

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An Englishman's Never So Natural As When He's Holding His Tongue.

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.

If I Should Certainly Say To A Novice, 'write From Experience And Experience Only,' I Should Feel That This Was Rather A Tantalizing Monition If I Were Not Careful Immediately To Add, 'try To Be One Of The People On Whom Nothing Is Lost.'

Things Are Always Different From What They Might Be.

Life Is, In Fact, A Battle. Evil Is Insolent And Strong; Beauty Enchanting, But Rare; Goodness Very Apt To Be Weak; Folly Very Apt To Be Defiant; Wickedness To Carry The Day; Imbeciles To Be In Great Places, People Of Sense In Small, And Mankind Generally Unhappy. But The World As It Stands Is No Narrow Illusion, No Phantasm, No Evil Dream Of The Night; We Wake Up To It, Forever And Ever; And We Can Neither Forget It Nor Deny It Nor Dispense With It.

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

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

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.

One Is Oneself A Fine Consequence.

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.

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

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 . . .

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.

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

It Is No Wonder He Wins Every Game. He Has Never Done A Thing In His Life Exept Play Games

...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.

Keep Making The Movements Of Life.

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What Is Either A Picture Or A Novel That Is Not Character?

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.

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

You Must Save What You Can Of Your Life; You Musn't Lose It All Simply Because You've Lost A Part.

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

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.

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?

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

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

To Read Between The Lines Was Easier Than To Follow The Text.

Read Between The Lines

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.

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.

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.

The Fatal Futility Of Fact.

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.

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.

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.

Experience Is Never Limited, And It Is Never Complete; It Is An Immense Sensibility, A Kind Of Huge Spider-web Of The Finest Silken Threads Suspended In The Chamber Of Consciousness, And Catching Every Air-borne Particle In Its Tissue.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

You Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

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.

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

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.

Kidd, Turn Off The Light To Spare My Blushes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

Autobiography May Be The Preeminent Kind Of American Expression.

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.

Innocent And Infinite Are The Pleasures Of Observation.

I Have Lived Too Long In Foreign Parts

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.

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.

She Is Written In A Foreign Tongue.

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

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

She Took Refuge On The Firm Ground Of Fiction, Through Which Indeed There Curled The Blue River Of Truth.

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

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

Ideas Are, In Truth, Force.

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

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.

Art Derives A Considerable Part Of Its Beneficial Exercise From Flying In The Face Of Presumptions.

Of Course What He Most Intensely Dreams Of Is Being Taken Out On Walks, And The More You Are Able To Indulge Him The More Will He Adore You And The More All The Latent Beauty Of His Nature Will Come Out.

I Am Incapable Of Telling You Not To Feel. Feel, Feel, I Say - Feel For All You're Worth, And Even If It Half Kills You, For That Is The Only Way To Live.

New York Is Appalling, Fantastically Charmless And Elaborately Dire.

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.

She Had A Certain Way Of Looking At Life Which He Took As A Personal Offense.

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

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

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.

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.

If You Are Going To Be Pushed You Had Better Jump

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

She Had Always Been Fond Of History, And Here [in Rome] Was History In The Stones Of The Street And The Atoms Of The Sunshine.

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.

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

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

I Don't Want Everyone To Like Me; I Should Think Less Of Myself If Some People Did.

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

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

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.

When You Forget To Eat, You Know You're Alive.

Ignorance Is Bliss

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

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

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

Adjectives Are The Sugar Of Literature And Adverbs The Salt.

I Have In My Own Fashion Learned The Lesson That Life Is Effort, Unremittingly Repeated.

I Don’t Think I Pity Her. She Doesn’t Strike Me As A Girl That Suggests Compassion. I Think I Envy Her... I Don’t Know Whether She Is A Gifted Being, But She Is A Clever Girl, With A Strong Will And A High Temper. She Has No Idea Of Being Bored...very Pretty Indeed; But I Don’t Insist Upon That. It’s Her General Air Of Being Someone In Particular That Strikes Me.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

She Had Her Own Way Of Doing All That She Did, And This Is The Simplest Description Of A Character Which, Although By No Means Without Liberal Motions, Rarely Succeeded In Giving An Impression Of Suavity.

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

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

If We Pretend To Respect The Artist At All We Must Allow Him His Freedom Of Choice , In The Face, In Particular Cases, Of Innumerable Presumptions That The Choice Will Not Fructify.

If One Is Strong, One Loves The More Strongly.

When I Am Wicked I Am In High Spirits.

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

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.

We Must For Dear Life Make Our Own Counter-realities.

I Take Up My Own Pen Again - The Pen Of All My Old Unforgettable Efforts And Sacred Struggles. To Myself - Today - I Need Say No More. Large And Full And High The Future Still Opens. It Is Now Indeed That I May Do The Work Of My Life. And I Will.

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

She Is Like A Revolving Lighthouse; Pitch Darkness Alternating With A Dazzling Brilliancy!

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.

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!

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

In Art Economy Is Always Beauty.

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.

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

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.

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

Excellence Does Not Require Perfection.

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?

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.

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

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.

Oxford Lends Sweetness To Labour And Dignity To Leisure.

She Carried Within Herself A Great Fund Of Life, And Her Deepest Enjoyment Was To Feel The Continuity Between The Movement Of Her Own Heart And The Agitations Of The World. For This Reason, She Was Fond Of Seeing Great Crowds, And Large Stretches Of Country, Of Reading About Revolutions And Wars, Of Looking At Historical Pictures--a Class Of Efforts To Which She Had Often Gone So Far As To Forgive Much Bad Painting For The Sake Of The Subject.

Writing Is Not Primarily Escape, But Use.

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

Deep Experience Is Never Peaceful.

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

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.

Live All You Can; It's A Mistake Not To.

Inspirational Life

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Time-honored Bread-sauce Of The Happy Ending.

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

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.

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.

That Accurst Autobiographic Form Which Puts A Premium On The Loose, The Improvised, The Cheap, And The Easy.

Don't Try So Much To Form Your Character - It's Like Trying To Pull Open A Tight, Tender Young Rose. Live As You Like Best And Your Character Will Take Care Of Itself.

To Believe In A Child Is To Believe In The Future. Through Their Aspirations They Will Save The World. With Their Combined Knowledge The Turbulent Seas Of Hate And Injustice Will Be Calmed.

Life Is A Predicament Which Precedes Death.

The Main Object Of The Novel Is To Represent Life. . .the Success Of A Work Of Art, To My Mind, May Be Measured By The Degree To Which It Produces A Certain Illusion; That Illusion Makes It Appear To Us For The Time That We Have Lived Another Life - That We Have Had A Miraculous Enlargement Of Experience.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Her Memory's Your Love. You Want No Other.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Happy You Poets Who Can Be Present And So Present By A Simple Flicker Of Your Genius, And Not, Like The Clumsier Race, Have To Laya Train And Pile Up Faggots That May Not After Prove In The Least Combustible!

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

Make (the Reader) Think The Evil, Make Him Think It For Himself, And You Are Released From Weak Specifications. My Values Are Positively All Blanks, Save So Far As An Excited Horror, A Promoted Pity, A Created Expertness... Proceed To Read Into Them More Or Less Fantastic Figures.

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

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Leonard Mlodinow

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