Alice James Quotes

It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon.

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

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

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

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.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

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

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...

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.

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.