"I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them."

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."

"The American girl isn't ANY girl, she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species."

"It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever."

"Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!"

"The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself."

"We work n the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

"To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him."

"The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times."

"Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination."

"Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal."

"An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue."

"Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself."

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."

"You think too much.''I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown."

"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints."

"It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've beenshockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard-the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices-as much as I can. Butwhen I've to come out and into a strong light-then, my dear, I'm a horror!"

"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition."

"She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl! Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her."

"The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her."

"It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be."

"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have."

"He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy."

"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."

"It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one."

"Nothing is my last word on anything."

"In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives."

"The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by installments."

"Mrs. Almond lived much farther up town, in an embryonic street with a high number-a region where the extension of the city began to assume a theoretic air, where poplars grew beside the pavement (when there was one), and mingled their shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them."

"People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!"

"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."

"When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement."

"It's very silly, she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it."

"If I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur."

"Life is a predicament which precedes death."

"To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live."

"I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."

"I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours."

"Ideas are, in truth, force."

"He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure."

"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."

"In art economy is always beauty."

"I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself."

"It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe."

"Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors."

"They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces."

"Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged."

"If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it."