William Dean Howells > Quotes

“Live all you can. It's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do -- but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven't done so -- and now I'm old. It's too late. It has gone past me -- I've lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!”
― William Dean Howells

“Some people stay longer in an hour than others do in a month.”
― William Dean Howells

“The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.”
― William Dean Howells

“Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
― William Dean Howells

“All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelist, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Burst of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jest together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and make it all up again with the conventional fitness of things.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet--a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”
― William Dean Howells, A Sleep and a Forgetting

“Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.”
― William Dean Howells

“People naturally despise a dependant.”
― William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria

“...I dare say if you'd asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you - if he knew.'
'Why, don't you think he does know, Bromfield?'
'I'm not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he's attached to them. It doesn't at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn't know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?”
― W.D. Howells

“Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say that it makes the new rich pay too much. But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about anyone else, and they respect them more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world…but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,--that would be rather bad,--but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future — to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?”
― William Dean Howells, Complete Works of William Dean Howells

“Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.”
― William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria

“I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you [Mark Twain] won't tell the black heart's-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shown upon.”
― William Dean Howells

“It's very odd...that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate--all those values shrink abominably.”
― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

“Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.”
― William Dean Howells

“New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay but prince or pauper, it's gay always...Yes, gay is the word...but frantic. I can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.”
― William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

“She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.”
― William Dean Howells, Editha

“It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.”
― William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

“NoMarch felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a decision. He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at the flat. Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able to show it effectively, he took it. He was aware more than ever of its absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his desires. He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.”
― William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes

“I don't know,” said the papa. “We shall just have to keep on and see. Perhaps when they meet the Prince and Princess we shall find out. I don't suppose a boy would fall in love with a boy.” “No,” said the niece; “but he might want to go off with him and have fun, or something.” “That's true,” said the papa. “We've got to all watch out.”
― William Dean Howells, Christmas Every Day and Other Stories

“I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience.”
― William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes