William Dean Howells

“ We are still far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing or fading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn.
The street takes care of itself; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is not of the insatiable Dutch type which will not spare the stones of the highway; but within the houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. ”

“ Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success.
Literature is beautiful only through the intelligence.
Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best.
They say frankly that the summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone.
The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind, or apart. The successful writer especially is in danger of becoming isolated from the realities that nurtured in him the strength to win success. ”

“ One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a literature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so much literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a literary centre. ”

“ She wonders the happiest women in the world can look each other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged about with misery. She declares that there's nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart. ”

“ I think that every author who is honest with himself must own that his work would be twice as good if it were done twice.
At once put aside all anxiety about style; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be added unto him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man's way of saying a thing. ”

“ Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you. ”

“ The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight. ”

“ If we had a grief with the Spanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we might have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen—mother and the little king. ”

“ It is one of the hard conditions of this state that while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. ”

“ And that's what makes all the trouble, in married life: we expect too much of each other—we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy. ”

“ I wish that the general reader, with whom the fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will not have, a dozen short stories in a book. ”

“ The voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.
There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. ”

“ Languages, while they live, are perpetually changing
Let fiction cease to lie about life
Long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition
Made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked
No greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth
Novels hurt because they are not true
Plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised
Pseudo-realists
Public wish to be amused rather than edified
Teach what they do not know
Tediously analytical
Unless we prefer a luxury of grief
Vulgarity: bad art to lug it in
Whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think ”

“ Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who love their country most among us. It is well to hold one's country to her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. ”

“ There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive than if he had not been there. ”

“ The day's work on land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, perched upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight on our own ground.
The lounging native walk is not the heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the deck in it.
STANDARD HOUSEHOLD EFFECT CO.
[WH#28] [whshe10.txt] 3381
As soon as she has got a thing she wants, she begins to hate it. ”

“ I have heard praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense.
At several times in our own lives we have accumulated stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. ”

“ Life alone is credible to the young
Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
Literature beautiful only through the intelligence
Literature is Business as well as Art
Literature has no objective value
Little knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows
Lived a thousand little lies every day
Livy: Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
Livy Clemens: the loveliest person I have ever seen
Long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition
Long breath was not his ”

“ Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
Boldest man is commonly a little behind a timid woman
Book that they are content to know at second hand
Browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust
Business to take advantage of his necessity
But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month
Buzz of activities and pretences
Capriciousness of memory: what it will hold and what lose
Chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own
Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
Church: "Oh yes, I go! ”

“ Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances when gathered into a boarding-house. ”

“ Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat; but unless one has lived at Kittery Point, and realized, from observation and experience, what a leading part cats may play in society, one cannot feel the full import of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, but every house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, and young ”

“ American Literature in Exile
The Horse Show
The Problem of the Summer
Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
From New York into New England
The Art of the Adsmith
The Psychology of Plagiarism
Puritanism in American Fiction
The What and How in Art
Politics in American Authors
Storage
"Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"
Aug 2002 Man Of Letters In Business, by W. Howells [WH#35] [whmlb10.txt] 3388
[Full Title: The Man Of Letters As A Man Of Business by W. D. Howells, 1911] ”

“ Maynard had had the same confidence in me that she would have had in any man I should not have failed. But every woman physician has a double disadvantage that I hadn't the strength to overcome,—her own inexperience and the distrust of other women."
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY
[WH#12] [whtwj10.txt] 3365
In the distance on either hand they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. ”

“ Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
He was not bored because he would not be
He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
His readers trusted and loved him
Men's lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
Not a man who cared to transcend ”

“ Aug 2002 Oliver Wendell Holmes, by W. D. Howells [WH#42] [whowh10.txt] 3395
[Full Title: Oliver Wendell Holmes, by W. D. Howells, 1911]
Aug 2002 The White Mr. Longfellow, by W. Howells [WH#41] [whlng10.txt] 3394
[Full Title: The White Mr. Longfellow, by W. D. Howells, 1911]
Aug 2002 Studies Of Lowell, by William Dean Howells [WH#40] [whlow10.txt] 3393
[Full Title: Studies Of Lowell, by W. D. Howells, 1911]
Aug 2002 Cambridge Neighbors, by W. D. Howells [WH#39] [whcbn10.txt] 3392
[Full Title: Cambridge Neighbors, by W. D. Howells, 1911] ”