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Read Ebook: Widger's Quotations from the Project Gutenberg Editions of the Works of William Dean Howells by Howells William Dean Widger David Editor
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Ebook has 214 lines and 11794 words, and 5 pages
She added, less sharply: "She couldn't afford to fail, though, at any point. The fad that fails is extinguished forever. Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it for somebody in real life you're asking, Mr. Verrian?"
DR. BREEN'S PRACTICE 3364
The neat weather-gray dwellings, shingled to the ground and brightened with door-yard flowers and creepers, straggled off into the boat-houses and fishing-huts on the shore, and the village seemed to get afloat at last in the sloops and schooners riding in the harbor, whose smooth plane rose higher to the eye than the town itself.
Very probably Dr. Mulbridge would not have recognized himself in the character of all-compelling lady's-novel hero, which Miss Gleason imagined for him.
Dr. Mulbridge smiled, as if he perceived her intention not to tell him something she wished to tell him.
"I believe that if Mrs. Maynard had had the same confidence in me that she would have had in any man I should not have failed. But every woman physician has a double disadvantage that I hadn't the strength to overcome,--her own inexperience and the distrust of other women."
THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY 3365
In the distance on either hand they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad.
Then it appeared that the cook would not believe in them, and he did not send them, till they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces of beef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit, steaming evilly up into the face when opened, and then soddening into masses of condensed dyspepsia.
"No," said Basil, not yet used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge.
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.
I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, V1 3366
She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping--Mrs. March breathed, "Oh yes!" in the sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom--
He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his heart.
They were at that time of life when people first turn to their children's opinion with deference.
He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.
She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, V2 3367
"Now, Alma," said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such natures.
Mrs. March asked her husband what a dividend was. "It's a chicken before it's hatched."
"I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours."
What you want is some man who can have patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius turning mediocrity on his hands.
You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But Ah don't mand it. I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience."
He had that timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, V3 3368
Dryfoos complained to his wife on the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives the sense of intellectual equality. He did not expect her to reason with him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the purpose, he still went to her for solace.
He began to brag of his wife, as a good husband always does when another woman charms him.
His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether you've got it till you try."
I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well--or something.
Men who have made money and do not yet know that money has made them....
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, V4 3369
He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then with anticipative reprisal.
In the course of his married life March had learned not to censure the irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had not learned....
She was too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made.
But in these matters we have no right to burden our friends with our decisions."
The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, V5 3370
Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you.
"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. "It's life that looks so in its presence. Death is peace and pardon.
Does any one deserve happiness?
Let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence.
"Does anything from without change us?" her husband mused aloud. "We're brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking, nowadays.
"Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. Fortunately, they're rare."
To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will....
SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY, V1 3371
The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.
I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of everything that I used to be sure of.
But the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared themselves nothing that they had time for.
Men would say anything from a reckless and culpable optimism.
While they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already....
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