Quotes from Alice James

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty to Truth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and country are as nothing to that?

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by-the-way?

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

How sick one gets of being 'good ' how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours embody selfishness.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

Original sin is my only refuge, I was born bad and I never have recovered

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of '78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.

I was born bad and I never have recovered.

Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected.

Sargy always had the capacities of a cormorant, so he is able to swallow her whole, not having to think about her as she is going down must make it easier

Imagine the martyrdom of a pun which has become an integral portion of one's organism to be lugged through life like the convict's ball and chain. Do you suppose he vainly tries to escape it, or is he passive in its clutches or can it be possible that some memory of the joy still survives which irradiated his being, the first time he heard it from his lips in the springtime of his practice?

All loss is gain. Since I have become so near-sighted I see no dust nor squalor, and therefore conceive of myself as living in splendor.

How profoundly grateful I am for the temperament which saves me from the wretched fate of those poor creatures who never find their bearings, but are tossed like dried leaves hither, thither and yon, at the mercy of every event which o'ertakes them; who feel no shame at being vanquished, or at crying out at the common lot of pain and sorrow; who never dimly suspect that the only thing which survives is the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life brings to us.

A young couple — bride eighteen, man twenty-two — came here for their honeymoon. The day after the wedding, he was found to have scarlet fever, and in two days he was dead. How cruel it is when pain and sorrow come to young things, — they are so helpless; what can they do with it? What a rush of desire to go to them and wrap them about in one's long-accustomedness until the little bewildered soul has woven for itself some sort of casing.