19th-century Author Quotes

A man's motive in the small actions of daily life, like resting a moment on his pitchfork in the sun and listening intently, may be the most important thing about that man.

To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn.

Marcel Jouhandeau

Come closer, boys. It will be easier for you.

Robert Erskine Childers

The essence of kitsch is the confusion of ethical and esthetic categories; kitsch wants to produce not the "good" but the "beautiful."

Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs?

Mabel Osgood Wright

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it?

Constance Fenimore Woolson

Her own excited feelings had magnified it in length, and breadth, and height — had made a molehill into a mountain...

Ellen Wood (author)

Enough has been unrolled to demand your sympathy and aid.

Harriet E. Wilson

It is rather calming to remember that you really couldn't have foreseen what is happening to you.

Margaret Widdemer

God send us power to make decision
With muscular, clean, fierce precision.
In life and song...

Of Copenhagen:

There are no islands and the country all about is very flat.

Mary Alsop King Waddington

It is only the happy who are hard, Gilles. I think perhaps it is better for the world if - if one has a broken heart. One is quick to recognise it, elsewhere. And one has time to think about other people, if there is nothing left to hope for any more.

We understood each other at once. And understanding is so much better than loving.

Bettina Riddle von Hutten

The spirit of the year, like bacchant crowned, With lighted torch goes careless on his way; And soon bursts into flame the maple's spray, And vines are running fire along the ground.

Edith M. Thomas

If only life were one long crisis, everyone would be perfect.

Angela Thirkell

When any man accumulates more than he can earn with his own hands, he begins to enrich himself at the expense of the youth, the sweat, the blood, the joy of his fellow men.

Gene Stratton-Porter

Let not my death be long,
But light
As a bird's swinging;
Happy decision in the height
Of song —
Then flight
From off the ultimate bough!
And let my wing be strong,
And my last note the first
Of another's singing.
See to it, Thou!

It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes.

We are no more content to plod along the beaten paths - and so marriage must go the way of God.

Ye'll learn perhaps that in law, a friend prosecuting is better than a friend defending!

Elinor Macartney Lane

I do not know the speech
Of this cool land,
I cannot keep its pace.

Else Lasker-Schüler

Not alone is the child born through the mother, but the mother also is born through the child.

Gertrud von Le Fort

The least that we are appears, actually, in the flesh, and the truth lies behind bone and muscle.

Mabel Dodge Luhan

The alchemy of home life went far to turn the dross of the Ghetto into gold.

Pictures of my life stretch back into what must have been my very earliest childhood.... They are not movies, then, nor are they talkies, but they are quite distinctly feelies.

Sheila Kaye-Smith