William Dean Howells Quotations

Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.

Out of the fragrant heart of bloom, The bobolinks are singing; Out of the fragrant heart of bloom The apple-tree whispers to the room, "Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?

The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, hand-carts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amidst the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism.

Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.

Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.

I know, indeed, of nothing more subtly satisfying and cheering than a knowledge of the real good will and appreciation of others. Such happiness does not come with money, nor does it flow from fine physical state. It cannot be brought. But it is the keenest joy, after all; and the toiler's truest and best reward.