O. Henry Quotes

By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker.

- The World And The Door

If there was ever an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptouwn on the Hudson called New York

Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section.

It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it.

He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul.

The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen.

Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks.It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends - never easy.

One dollar and eighty-seven cents.

Be content with what thou seest; and wait until Time and Experience shall teach thee to find jealousy behind the sweet smile, and hatred under the honeyed word!' "This

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen - the census taker - and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million.

Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.

A holiday in a new dress-can earth offer anything more enchanting?

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

Ransie was a narrow six feet of sallow brown skin and yellow hair. The imperturbability of the mountains hung upon him like a suit of armor. The woman was calicoed, angled, snuff-brushed, and weary with unknown desires. Through it all gleamed a faint protest of cheated youth unconscious of its loss.

Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside.

Those whom we first love we seldom marry

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.

Turn up the lights - I don't want to go home in the dark.

You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hay-seeds are bailed hay-seeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off for the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!

Each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary notices them do part.

Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks.

This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.

The bottle, with its impotent message, was gone out to sea, and the problem that it had provoked was reduced to a simple sum in addition - one and one make two, by the rule of arithmetic; one by the rule of romance.

There was a sylvan attitude of somnolent sleepiness pervading that section of the external outward surface of Alabama that lay exposed to my view.

He could talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he never sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit.

But how is it now? All we get is orders; and the laws go out of the state. Them legislators set up there at Austin and don't do nothing but makes laws against kerosene oil and schoolbooks being brought into the state. I reckon they was afraid some man would go home some evening after work and light up and get an education and go to work and make laws to repeal aforesaid laws.

The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.

We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster ... I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story.

To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the powers of the man she worships.

It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an agriculturist.

She had
become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the
air he breathed
necessary but scarcely noticed.

And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.

When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves.

Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust.

It shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere.

Will you buy my hair?

Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way.

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard.

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?

Be always decent and right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit.

There is a quaint old theory that man may have two souls - a peripheral one which serves ordinarily, and a central one which is stirred only at certain times, but then with activity and vigour.
While under the domination of the former a man will shave, vote, pay taxes, give money to his family, buy subscription books and comport himself on the average plan.
But let the central soul suddenly become dominant, and he may, in the twinkling of an eye, turn upon the partner of his joys with furious execration; he may change his politics while you could snap your fingers; he may deal out deadly insult to his dearest friend; he may get him, instanter, to a monastery or a dance hall; he may elope, or hang himself - or he may write a song or poem, or kiss his wife unasked, or give his funds to the search of a microbe. Then the peripheral soul will return; and we have our safe, sane citizen again. It is but the revolt of the Ego against Order; and its effect is to shake up the atoms only that they may settle where they belong.

It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State.

In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.

In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places.

Except in streetcars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.

You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could - "
"Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the papers about it." (from "The Plutonian Fire")

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.

Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's.

Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins - those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense.

She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, "parallelogram!" and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder. That

There'll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee & over to Norfolk for his rolls, & reaches up to Vermont & digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, & then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he'd come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia.

Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.

Maybe the hairs on my head were numbered" she went on with a sudden serious sweetness "but nobody could ever count my love for you".

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature.

I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist.

O'Henry 'The Plutonian Fire' (1905)

I should like to be a periwinkle," said he, mysteriously, "on the top of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo."
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan.

Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.

There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat
the ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions
ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable
the mutual help and inspiration; and
overlook my artlessness
stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m.

Pennies saved one and two at a time

She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a wiltingly disapproving gaze, & then went inside, humming a light song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence.

It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.

True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted - golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasures, crowns, and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Sob - when he started back home.

Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of.

Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle.

He studied cities as women study their reflections.

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction.

Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man.

Bolivar cannot carry double