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...

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...

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.

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

In art economy is always beauty.

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.

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…

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...

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...

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...

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

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

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....

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...

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

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.

Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number—a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when...

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle...

Don’t question your conscience so much–it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.

I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

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...

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

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

One never said the things one wanted — one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn’t, simply from a sense that one had...

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right...

Deep experience is never peaceful.

My envy’s not dangerous; it wouldn’t hurt a mouse.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we’ll wake up to find our work done because we’ve lain all night a-dreaming...

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in...

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...

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....

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.