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 of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!
If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
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.
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete.
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
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 colour.
Don’t underestimate the value of irony – it is extremely valuable.
She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.
You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue – to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud – a missile that should never have reached you – and down you drop to the ground.
One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of ‘liking’ a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
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.
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.