"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."

"I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me."

"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."

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman."

"My envy's not dangerous, it wouldn't hurt a mouse."

"She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering."

"One never said the things one wanted - one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something."

"He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts."

"I don't want everyone to like me, I should think less of myself if some people did."

"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."

"Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions."

"It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry."

"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

"The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?"

"True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one's self but the point is not only to get out you must stay out and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."

"There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."

"I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect."

"The real offence as she ultimately perceived was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park."

"Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures."

"Don't underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable."

"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."

"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."

"However British you may be, I am more British still."

"She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest 'Never!' I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed my hat: 'I know what to think then. It's nothing!"

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."

"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

"Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it."

"That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything."

"Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it."

"He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures."

"Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President."

"Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

"We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it."

"The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements-an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast."

"What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form."

"Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet."

"You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto."

"Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway."

"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."

"Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it."

"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

"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."

"Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance."

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire."

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life."

"There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding."