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 a conspiracy to under value them.
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The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
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No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
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Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
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People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
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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.
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Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!
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In art economy is always beauty.
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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.
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it --this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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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 in its tissue.
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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The fatal futility of Fact.
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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.
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The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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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?
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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
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Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
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In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
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Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
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Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
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Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
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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.
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Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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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.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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