Quote collection
251 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it."
"I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin."
"...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."
"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 "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."
"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."
"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?"
"Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications."
"I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it."
"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."
"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."
"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have."
"We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are."
"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 believe in a child is to believe in the Future."
"I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination."
"She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities."
"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."
"If this was love, love had been overrated."