Quotes from Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised knee of the Venus of Melos?

The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.

O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!

Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs -- putting in his oar, so to speak -- with some pat word or sentence.

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.

I hope he and she that was Miss Wang Wang are very happy together, sitting cross-legged over diminutive cups of tea in a sky-blue tower hung with bells.

When I behold what pleasure is Pursuit, What life, what glorious eagerness it is, Then mark how full Possession falls from this, How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit

So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.

Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven that from the East glad message brings.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

These Winter nights against my window-pane Nature with busy pencil draws designs Of ferns and blossoms and fine spray of pines, Oak-leaf and acorn and fantastic vines, Which she will make when summer comes again-- Quaint arabesques in argent, flat and cold, Like curious Chinese etchings.

My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.

That was indeed to live -- at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.

Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed The white of their leaves, the amber grain Shrunk in the wind -- and the lightning now Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct historical shadows to the generation immediately following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.