Emotions and Feelings

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence.

[ Of George Bernard Shaw :] An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had “troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had “complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years with “troubles,” but they almost always succumbed to “complications.”

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.

[ Flower Belle Lee, played by Mae West, replying to judge’s question, “Are you trying to show contempt for the court?” :] No, I’m doing my best to hide it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a graveannouncement to make. Incredible as it mayseem, strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading armyfrom Mars.