Paul Negri > Quotes

“Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I’ll not look for wine.”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“Then since we mortal lovers are, Ask not how long our love will last; But while it does, let us take care Each minute be with pleasure past: Were it not madness to deny To live because we’re sure to die?”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“Memory My mind lets go a thousand things, Like dates of wars and deaths of kings, And yet recalls the very hour—’T was noon by yonder village tower, And on the last blue noon in May—The wind came briskly up this way, Crisping the brook beside the road; Then, pausing here, set down its load Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly Two petals from that wild-rose tree.”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“Latimer, old boy,” he said to me in a tone of compassionate cordiality, “what a pity it is you don’t have a run with the hounds now and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!” “Low spirits!” I thought bitterly, as he rode away; “that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows. It is to such as you that the good of this world falls: ready dulness, healthy selfishness, good-tempered conceit,—these are the keys to happiness.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; ‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.” And I am two-and-twenty, And oh, ‘tis true, ’tis true. Into”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“IT WAS late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence;”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“There must always have been an antipathy between our natures. As it was, he became in a few weeks an object of intense hatred to me; and when he entered the room, still more when he spoke, it was as if a sensation of grating metal had set my teeth on edge. My diseased consciousness was more intensely and continually occupied with his thoughts and emotions than with those of any other person who came in my way. I was perpetually exasperated with the petty promptings of his conceit and his love of patronage, with his self-complacent belief in Bertha Grant’s passion for him, with his half-pitying contempt for me—”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Wall, I’ll swan, Henry, yuh ain’t jokin’, are yuh?” said the solid Dodge, a pursy man, with a smooth, hard, red face. “It can’t be your wife yuh’re talkin’ about. She’s dead.” “Dead! Shucks!” retorted the demented Reifsneider. “She left me early this mornin’, while I was sleepin’. She allus got up to build the fire, but she’s gone now. We had a little spat last night, an’ I guess that’s the reason. But I guess I kin find her. She’s gone over to Matilda Race’s; that’s where she’s gone.” He started briskly up the road, leaving the amazed Dodge to stare in wonder after him.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Through all these crowded excited months, Bertha’s inward self remained shrouded from me, and I still read her thoughts only through the language of her lips and demeanour: I had still the human interest of wondering whether what I did and said pleased her, of longing to hear a word of affection, of giving a delicious exaggeration of meaning to her smile. But I was conscious of a growing difference in her manner towards me; sometimes strong enough to be called haughty coldness, cutting and chilling me”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul’s, and the boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever he could.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, a studded serpent with diamond eyes. I shuddered,—I despised this woman with the barren soul and mean thoughts; but I felt helpless before her, as if she clutched my bleeding heart, and would clutch it till the last drop of life-blood ebbed away. She was my wife, and we hated each other.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“hauteur”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he got to sleep,—and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Bertha stood pale at the foot of the bed, quivering and helpless, despairing of devices, like a cunning animal whose hiding-places are surrounded by swift-advancing flame. Even Meunier looked paralysed; life for that moment ceased to be a scientific problem to him. As for me, this scene seemed of one texture with the rest of my existence: horror was my familiar,”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“felt that Bertha had been watching for the moment of death as the sealing of her secret: I thanked Heaven it could remain sealed for me.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Bertha, the self-possessed, who usually seemed inaccessible to feminine agitations, and did even her hate in a self-restrained hygienic manner.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“saying. I remember well the look and the smile with which she one day said, after a mistake of this kind on my part: “I used to think you were a clairvoyant, and that was the reason why you were so bitter against other clairvoyants, wanting to keep your monopoly; but I see now you have become rather duller than the rest of the world.”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“It was one morning when the details of his lonely state were virtually unendurable that he woke with the thought that she was not dead. How he had arrived at this conclusion it is hard to say. His mind had gone. In its place was a fixed illusion. He and Phoebe had had a senseless quarrel. He had reproached her for not leaving his pipe where he was accustomed to find it, and she had left. It was an aberrated fulfillment of her old jesting threat that if he did not behave himself she would leave him.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“there were no audible quarrels between us; our alienation, our repulsion from each other, lay within the silence of our own hearts;”
― Paul Negri, Great English Short Stories

“Flower in the Crannied Wall Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
― Paul Negri, Great Short Poems

“It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul’s fairy tale, and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying splendid, brilliant things.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“The moon by this time had shifted to a position on the western side of the house, and it now shone in through the windows of the living-room and those of the kitchen beyond. A certain combination of furniture—a chair near a table, with his coat on it, the half-open kitchen door casting a shadow, and the position of a lamp near a paper—gave him an exact representation of Phoebe leaning over the table as he had often seen her do in life. It gave him a great start. Could it be she—or her ghost?”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Phoebe, where’s my corn-knife? You ain’t never minded to let my things alone no more.” “No you hush, Henry,” his wife would caution him in a cracked and squeaky voice. “If you don’t, I’ll leave yuh. I’ll git up and walk out of here some day, and then where would y’ be? Y’ ain’t got anybody but me to look after yuh, so yuh just behave yourself. Your corn-knife’s on the mantel where it’s allus been unless you’ve gone an’ put it summers else.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“Well, you’ve got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds. You look as if you’d been insulted whenever you’re thrown with any except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I’m cut in on every few feet—and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. No girl can afford to neglect them. They’re the big part of any crowd. Young boys too shy to talk are the very best conversational practice. Clumsy boys are the best dancing practice. If you can follow them and yet look graceful you can follow a baby tank across a barb-wire sky-scraper.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more

“like most boys, he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it.”
― Paul Negri, Great American Short Stories: Hawthorne, Poe, Cather, Melville, London, James, Crane, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bierce, Twain & more