Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent.
Is this life?‘Alice wondered, not doubting that the question was original and all her own. ‘Is it life to spend your time imagining things that aren’t so, and never will be? Beautiful things happen to other people; why should I be the only one they never can happen to?
So far as Alice was concerned Russell might have worn a placard,‘Engaged’. She looked upon him as diners entering a restaurant look upon tables marked ‘Reserved”: the glance, slightly discontented, passes on at once.
An ideal wife is any woman who has an ideal husband.
Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.
Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.
The only good in pretending is the fun we get out of fooling ourselves that we fool somebody.
The only safe male rebuke to a scornful female is to stay away from her – especially if that is what she desires.
One of the hardest conditions of boyhood is the almost continuous strain put upon the powers of invention by the constant and harassing necessity for explanations for every natural act.
This is a boy’s lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime – he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.
There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.
Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.
The understanding smile of an old wife to her husband is one of the loveliest things in the world.
They were upon their great theme: “When I get to be a man!” Being human, though boys, they considered their present estate too commonplace to be dwelt upon. So, when the old men gather, they say: “When I was a boy!” It really is the land of nowadays that we never discover.
Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous.
Some day the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady.
Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously.
Superciliousness is not safe after all, because a person who forms the habit of wearing it may some day find his lower lip grown permanently projected beyond the upper, so that he can’t get it back, and must go through life looking like the King of Spain.
Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.
Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it’s shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn’t he? When a son cuts somebody’s throat the mother only sees it’s possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil – and she’s entirely right about that!