Alice James Quotations

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

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.

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.

I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

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

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

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

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

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

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?

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.

Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected.

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

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...

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

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

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.

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.

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

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

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.

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.

I wonder, whether, if I had had any education I should have been more, or less, of a fool than I am. It would have deprived me surely of those exquisite moments of mental flatulence which every now and then inflate the cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibilities-of stretching oneself to cosmic limits, and who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that.

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