19th-century Novelist Quotes

Tell England, ye who pass this monument,
We died for her, and here we rest content.

O, to bring back the great Homeric time, The simple manners and the deed sublime: When the wise Wanderer, often foiled by Fate, Through the long furrow drave the ploughshare straight.

Mortimer Collins
Mortimer Collins
Tell him I will bear my disgrace like an Indian and will wait to strike till the time is in my favor.

Conrad Richter
Conrad Richter
It is not the great temptations that ruin us; it is the little ones.

Her beauty, passive in despair, Through sand and seaweed shone, The fairest jelly-fish I e'er Had set mine eyes upon. It would have made a stone abuse The callousness of fate, This creature of prismatic hues, Stranded and desolate!

I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.

An author never has a vacation. He's a walking sponge, sopping up impressions till he's saturated, then going to his desk and squeezing them out on paper.

While beer brings gladness, don't forget That water only makes you wet!

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold, freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral Britain.

There's Conservatives an' they want to make things better by keepin' 'em jus' like what they are now. An' there's Lib'rals an' they want to make things better by alterin' them jus' a bit, but not so's anyone'd notice, an' there's communists an' they want to make things better by killin' everyone but themselves.

Richmal Crompton
Richmal Crompton
There is a passion of reverence, almost of pity, mingling with the love of an honest man for a pure girl, which makes it the most exquisite, perhaps, of all human sentiments.

The sunshine of thine eyes,
(O still celestial beam!)
Whatever it touches it fills
With the life of its lambent gleam.

The sunshine of thine eyes,
Oh, let it fall on me!
Though I be but a mote of the air,
I could turn to gold for thee.

George Parsons Lathrop
George Parsons Lathrop
Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity.

Joseph Furphy
Joseph Furphy
A church is an interesting place once you get the parson and the people out of it. Real music can get in then, and a real God! Nothing flibertigibbet about religion then.

Mazo de la Roche
Mazo de la Roche
One doesn't love any of the things of Summer as much as one does the things of Spring.

Anne Douglas Sedgwick
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
But you must be patient and careful; nor should you expect to become an accomplished archer without long and severe training.

Rather like spent swimmers, who had given up the hope of rescue and then had suddenly met with it, they were sensing with all their being, the feel of the solid ground beneath their feet, the grateful monotony of the skies above their heads,... and everywhere about them the immanence of God.... The Chinaberry Tree became a Temple.

Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset
I wish I were a brewer's horse
Five quarters of a year;
I'd place my head where was my tail,
And drink up all the beer.

I have a work presently in the Press named 'Six Months in Hell' which you may one day read. I consider it will be worth perusing, bruising badly the morals of Britain and America, while Royalty, clergy, critics, society and bloodhounds of law must all incur its censure.

He had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany...

And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.

May Sinclair
May Sinclair
The moon of a bright silver, which dazzles by its shining, illumines a world which surely is no longer ours; for it resembles in nothing what may be seen in other lands.

Pierre Loti
Pierre Loti
For chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.

A tall young man sped swiftly up the wide stone steps leading to the doorway of a mansion in one of Chicago's most fashionable avenues.

The dog was cold and in pain. But being only a dog it did not occur to him to trot off home to the comfort of the library fire and leave his master to fend for himself.

Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune