Quotes and Images From The Works of William Dean Howells   By: William Dean Howells (1837-1920)

THE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful

Account of one's reading is an account of one's life

Affections will not be bidden

Beginning to grow old with touching courage

Book that they are content to know at second hand

Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature

Comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped

Contemptible he found our pseudo equality

Critical vanity and self righteousness

Critics are in no sense the legislators of literature

Despair broke in laughter

Dickens rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust

Didn't reason about their beliefs, but only argued

Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts

Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear

Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly

Exchanging inaudible banalities

Fear of asking too much and the folly of asking too little

For most people choice is a curse

Forbear the excesses of analysis

Gift of waiting for things to happen

Got out of it all the fun there was in it

Government is best which governs least

Habit of saying some friendly lying thing

He was not bored because he would not be

He had no time to make money

He's so resting

He's the same kind of a man that he was a boy

Heighten our suffering by anticipation

Heroic lies

His readers trusted and loved him

I do not think any man ought to live by an art

If one were poor, one ought to be deserving

If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be

Incredible in their insipidity

Industrial slavery

Lewd literature seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the life

Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm

Life alone is credible to the young

Livy: Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you

Livy Clemens: the loveliest person I have ever seen

Luxury of helplessness

Married Man: after the first start off he don't try

Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation

Morbid egotism

My reading gave me no standing among the boys

Neatness that brings despair

Never paid in anything but hopes of paying

Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy

New England necessity of blaming some one

None of the passions are reasoned

NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less

Old man's disposition to speak of his infirmities

Pathetic hopefulness

Plain speaking or Rude Speaking

Praised it enough to satisfy the author

Pseudo realists

Public wish to be amused rather than edified

Real artistocracy is above social prejudice

Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous

Refused to see us as we see ourselves

Shackles of belief worn so long

She liked to get all she could out of her emotions

Society interested in a woman's past, not her future

Teach what they do not know

Somewhat too studied grace

Sunny gayety of self forgetfulness

Secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise

Self satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality

Submitted, as people always do with the trials of others

Tediously analytical

They are so many and I am so few

Truth is beyond invention

Used to ingratitude from those he helped

Vacuous vulgarity

We did not know that we were poor

We're company enough for ourselves

What we thought ruin, but what was really release

When she's really sick, she's better

Wonder why we hate the past so? "It's so damned humiliating!"

You can't go back to anything

You may do a great deal (of work), and not get on

You marry a man's future as well as his past

You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke

COMPLETE QUOTATIONS