Quotes from William Dean Howells

It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.

A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.

The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.

The conqueror is regarded with awe the wise man commands our respect but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection.

Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests.

Walt Whitman was not the first to observe that we are all naked under our clothes, but he was one of the greatest, if not the first, to preach a gospel of nudity.

People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.

forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The

It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do.

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.

What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending

She felt him more than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul.

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.

I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know ourselves in our heats, 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.

When in time of peace only one man can save us, we're hardly worth saving.

As it was now evident that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson's offer.

There's always something to say on both sides, even when one's a wrong side. That's what makes it all so tiresome-makes you wish you were dead. Take the right side and stick to that.

I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience.

Character is a superstition, a wretched fetish. Once a year wouldn't be too often to seize upon sinners whose blameless life has placed them above suspicion, and turn them inside out before the community, so as to show people how the smoke of the Pit had been quietly blackening their interior.

in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands.

That's what makes me really think that women can never amount to anything in art. They keep all their appointments, and fulfil all their duties just as if they didn't know anything about art.