O. Henry Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other.

O. Henry
He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienist and the florist.

O. Henry
Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper.

O. Henry
You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hay-seeds are bailed hay-seeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off for the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

O. Henry
Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way.

O. Henry
Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions. He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner.

O. Henry
A straw vote, says I, only shows which way the hot air blows.

O. Henry
Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence.

O. Henry
Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

O. Henry
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

O. Henry
She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).

O. Henry
Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.

O. Henry
I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.

O. Henry
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

O. Henry
She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed—necessary but scarcely noticed.

O. Henry
Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.

O. Henry
There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.

O. Henry
I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.

O. Henry
It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.

O. Henry
There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.

O. Henry
It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.

O. Henry