Alice James Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

Alice James
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.

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

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

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

Alice James
Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.

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

Alice James
The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.

Alice James
How heroic to be able to suppress one's vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard.

Alice James
I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.

Alice James
Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumle along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?

Alice James
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.

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

Alice James
How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

Alice James
It is so comic to hear one's self called old; even at ninety, I suppose!

Alice James
The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

Alice James
Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected.

Alice James
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?

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

Alice James
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.

Alice James
What one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, — form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.

Alice James