"It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon."
Read quote
71 likes
Quote collection
Alice James quotes (page 1 of 2)
25 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience."
Read quote
14 likes
"The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?"
Read quote
11 likes
"I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am."
Read quote
10 likes
"You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied."
Read quote
10 likes
"When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that."
Read quote
10 likes
"Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity."
Read quote
10 likes
"Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes."
Read quote
10 likes
"I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more."
Read quote
9 likes
"Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul."
Read quote
9 likes
"How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind."
Read quote
9 likes
"Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected."
Read quote
9 likes
"How heroic to be able to suppress one's vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard."
Read quote
8 likes
"How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness."
Read quote
6 likes
"What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading."
Read quote
6 likes
"The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape"
Read quote
6 likes
"The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency."
Read quote
6 likes
"It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!"
Read quote
6 likes
"What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, -- form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life."
Read quote
5 likes
"I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations."
Read quote
5 likes