O. Henry Quotes

81 Sourced Quotes

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"--that's what they sing.

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

O. Henry
For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction.

O. Henry
In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in its greatness.

O. Henry
She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm — always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety.

O. Henry
To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the powers of the man she worships.

O. Henry
By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering choice places wherein to feed.

O. Henry
Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

O. Henry
It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.

O. Henry
Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.

O. Henry
Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.

O. Henry
If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York.

O. Henry
Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

O. Henry
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.

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

O. Henry
By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.

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
"What you've got," says Idaho, "is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists. They poison your mind..."

O. Henry
Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

O. Henry
Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it. During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion. In the case of Lorison, his particular ethics positively forbade him to declare his sentiments, but he must needs dally with the subject, and woo by innuendo at least.

O. Henry
Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

O. Henry
Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside.

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
All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

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

O. Henry