It might be that women who have beennurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taughtto have too much respect.
Realism in so far as it means Reality to life is always bad art.
Most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.
There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.
Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,′ he had said. ‘You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.
Io sono uno che ama e non ho trovato la cosa da amare.
From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy.
To be civilized, really, is to be aware of the others, their hopes, their gladnesses, their illusions about life.
If England was the mother of the Big Boy, America, she was, I fear, a woman of questionable virtue. No one knows for certain who the father was.
If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she explained. “It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared. Now it’s time to be living. I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting. You must not become a mere peddler of words. The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.
He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.
One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man.
Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one’s judgments of life.
Little pyramids of truth he erected and after erecting knocked them down again that he might have the truths to erect other pyramids.
It is my own language, limited as it is. I will have to learn to work with it. There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.
She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on.
I have always been one who wanted a great of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it.
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and others.
What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to do something well – to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of doing it – to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own under my fingers, eh?