Great Throughts Treasury

"His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin."

"However British you may be, I am more British still."

"How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?"

"However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like ? not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing."

"However, Nick acted as much as possible under the circumstances, and that was rectifying ? it brought with it enjoyment and a working faith. He had not gone counter to the axiom that in a case of doubt one was to hold off; for that applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if there was essentially a problem in his life it would only grow tougher with keeping. But if doing one's sum to-morrow instead of to-day does not make the sum easier it at least makes to-day so."

"I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."

"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."

"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..."

"I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."

"I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination."

"I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue."

"I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world."

"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."

"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."

"I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did."

"I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all color out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!"

"I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated."

"I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience?or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dullness in a world grown too noisy."

"I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman."

"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."

"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."

"I keep a band of music in my ante-room, he said once to her. It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within."

"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."

"I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin."

"I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."

"I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?"

"I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them--I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say."

"I still, in presence of life... have reactions ? as many as possible... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions ? appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing ? and I do. I believe I shall do yet again ? it is still an act of life."

"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."

"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 think patriotism is like charity - it begins at home."

"I waited so long for this, I'll keep signing all day if they want. The process has been rough along the way, but it's all over with and it feels good to be a Texas Longhorn."

"I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them."

"I think what you find is that the telecom names, both large and small cap, are highly sensitive to any upward mobility in interest rates. They should be volatile in this period as we wait to see what the Fed will do."

"I used to call her, in my stupidity ? for want of anything better ? a dove."

"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."

"I would be an American. I would steep myself in America."

"Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history."

"I?ll watch with you."

"I would know no other land."

"If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles."

"If one is strong, one loves the more strongly."

"If you are going to be pushed you had better jump."

"If I don?t 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."

"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."

"If I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back."

"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?"

"If this was love, love had been overrated."