James Ryan Daley > Quotes

“You can never really know the truth. Not about life, not about God, not about what’s in another person’s heart, or even your own. All you can ever really know is what it feels like. What it feels like to laugh and cry and hate and hurt and hope and fear and love; what it feels like to live.”
― James Ryan Daley, Jesus Jackson

“This falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his last days.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay, but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“He was a man whom prosperity harmed.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more

“They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill.”
― James Ryan Daley, The World's Greatest Short Stories: Selections from Hemingway, Tolstoy, Woolf, Chekhov, Joyce, Updike and more