He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well...

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.

The American girl isn’t ANY girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going....

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing...

I never did anything in life to anyone’s imagination.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

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...

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it’s process.

You think too much.”I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches–a...

Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

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.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

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.

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

She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones – the really clever ones –...

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her.

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

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow...

..if I dont 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.

Cats and monkeys – monkeys and cats – all human life is there!

Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don’t you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several...

Ideas are, in truth, force.

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a...

She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at...

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

In art economy is always beauty.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

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.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?

One need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible to the charm of an English country church…

It has not been a successful life.”No — it has only been a beautiful one.

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

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong.

The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red...

Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doutbless only in America; American life had smoothed the...

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

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity,...

The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive...

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know...

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change....

Mr. Morris’s poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial...

An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.