William McFee Quotes

Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.

Fear, born of the stern matron Responsibility, sits on one's shoulders like some heavy imp of darkness, and one is preoccupied and, possibly, cantankerous.

The artist in his teens who is happy is a charlatan. Life comes bursting in all around lis too suddenly, too crudely, too cruelly, for happiness.

The world is not interested in the storms you encountered, but did you bring in the ship?

The artist isn't particularly keen on getting a thing done, as you call it. He gets his pleasure out of doing it, playing with it, fooling with it, if you like. The mere completion of it is an incident.

It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life.

People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right, writes no guarantee against misfortune.

There is nothing like a start, and being born, however pessimistic one may become in later years, is undeniably a start.

Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.

There is far too much talk of love and grief benumbing the faculties, turning the hair gray, and destroying a man's interest in his work. Grief has made many a man look younger.

That is my rule of life. If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Do you remember Henley's magnificent lines?
'Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.' ?
That is my gospel. What do you think of it?

Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.

There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.

Woman dwell always in the palace of unpalatable truth and never by any chance is there a magic talisman to save them from their destiny. Speech is their ultimate need. We men exist for them only in so far as we can be described.

There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?

The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation that cancels out without warning when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.