Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.
It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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.
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.
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.
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
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.
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.