The “germ,” wherever gathered, has ever been for me, “the germ of a story,” and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
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.
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.
Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
She is written in a foreign tongue.
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see – that’s my idea of happiness.
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
I ought to tell you I’m probably your cousin.
Her memory’s your love. You want no other.
It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
When I am wicked I am in high spirits.
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.