Quotes

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer. ~ The Professor at the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. What a blessed thing it is, that Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left! ~ The Professor at the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening. ~ The Professor at the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. ~ The Professor at the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks? ~ The Professor at the Breakfast Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It was this willingness to find poetry in things around them that kept his life and Isabel's fresh, and they taught their children the secret of their elixir. ~ Their Wedding Journey by William Dean Howells The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car, and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts in the world. ~ Their Wedding Journey by William Dean Howells There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. ~ Their Wedding Journey by William Dean Howells In a moment it had come, the first serious dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing, and it was on them in full disaster ere they knew. ~ Their Wedding Journey by William Dean Howells How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? ~ Adam Bede by George Eliot