Misattributed William Howells Quotes

An acre of performance is worth the whole Land of promise ~ James Howell

The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding. ~ William H. Whyte

People naturally despise a dependant. ~ William Dean Howells

How strange it (the earthquake) must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way! ~ William Dean Howells

New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay but prince or pauper, it's gay always ... Yes, gay is the word ... but frantic. I can't get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York. ~ William Dean Howells

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise. ~ William Dean Howells

Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered. ~ William Dean Howells

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment. ~ William Dean Howells

It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry. ~ William Dean Howells

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

I don't know," said the papa. "We shall just have to keep on and see. Perhaps when they meet the Prince and Princess we shall find out. I don't suppose a boy would fall in love with a boy." "No," said the niece; "but he might want to go off with him and have fun, or something." "That's true," said the papa. "We've got to all watch out. ~ William Dean Howells

Lord, for the erring thoughtNot into evil wrought:Lord, for the wicked willBetrayed and baffled still:For the heart from itself kept,Our thanksgiving accept. ~ William Dean Howells

Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns. ~ William Dean Howells

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. ~ William Dean Howells

It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. ~ William Dean Howells

It's astonishing how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. ~ William Dean Howells

Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the foot of the feudal system! ~ William Dean Howells

The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. ~ William Dean Howells

I haven't done anything--yet. ~ William Dean Howells

We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one interest at a time fills these. ~ William Dean Howells

N artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty. ~ William Dean Howells

Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step. ~ William Dean Howells

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal. ~ William Dean Howells

No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,
that would be rather bad,
but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should ~ William Dean Howells

It's very odd ... that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate
all those values shrink abominably. ~ William Dean Howells

You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up. ~ William Dean Howells

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise. ~ William Dean Howells

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. ~ William Dean Howells

It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future - to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive? ~ William Dean Howells

The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection. ~ William Dean Howells

And the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author's. At times he has enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks's last address in ~ William Dean Howells

We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world ... but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever. ~ William Dean Howells

Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart. ~ William Dean Howells

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

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use - in or out of 'context' - of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war ~ Christopher Hitchens