Great Throughts Treasury

"If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it."

"I'm a perfectly equipped failure... 'Thank goodness you're a failure- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you- look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honor?"

"I'm glad you like adverbs ? I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."

"In art economy is always beauty."

"In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons."

"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."

"Intelligent, unscrupulous, determined, and capable of seeing a man strangled without changing color."

"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."

"Is that another sort of joke? asked the old man. You've no excuse for being bored anywhere. When I was your age I had never heard of such a thing."

"It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions."

"It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration?I can call it by no other name?was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul?held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length?had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead."

"Isabel took a drive alone that afternoon; she wished to be far away, under the sky, where she could descend from her carriage and tread upon the daisies. She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where it?s very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a moldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar-pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a spiritual visitation."

"It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever."

"It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk."

"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."

"It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her."

"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."

"It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could cultivate his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation--which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once."

"It has been my fate, and one's fate one accepts. It's a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world."

"It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers."

"It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier."

"It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can?t think of anything better. It?s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it?s a delightful story."

"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. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners ? all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form... But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life? It is the biggest aggregation of human life ? the most complete compendium of the world."

"It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one?s mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses."

"It is enough to say that her perception of the endless interest of the place was such as might have been expected in a young woman of her intelligence and culture. She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. She had an imagination that kindled at the mention of great deeds, and wherever she turned some great deed had been acted. These things excited her but they had been quietly excited... To her own knowledge she was very happy; she would have even been willing to believe that these were to be on the whole the happiest hours of her life. The sense of mighty human past was upon her, but it was interfused in the strangest, suddenest, most capricious way, with fresh cool breath of the future. Her feelings were so mingled that she scarcely knew whither any of them would lead her, and she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there."

"It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench, that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow."

"It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep."

"It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Bryron presently became conscious--all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night he had made of it."

"It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed."

"It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life except play games"

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

"It was as if these depths, constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare express, uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended."

"It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home; and that Mrs. Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him."

"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition."

"It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened."

"It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside."

"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."

"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 color."

"It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience."

"It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion."

"It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools."

"It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey?s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perception. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend?s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item ? to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man?s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He would n?t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act ? frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected ? of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights."

"It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be."

"Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there."

"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."

"Keep making the movements of life."

"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."

"I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them."

"Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes."

"Leaves of Grass is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste."