Top 100 O. Henry Quotes
#1. Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
O. Henry
#2. 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.
O. Henry
#3. Turn up the lights - I don't want to go home in the dark.
O. Henry
#4. It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an agriculturist.
O. Henry
#5. If there was ever an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptouwn on the Hudson called New York
O. Henry
#6. Greenwich Village ... the village of low rents and high arts.
O. Henry
#7. Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!
O. Henry
#8. 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.
O. Henry
#9. There is no well defined boundary line between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in the one domain and sometimes in the other.
O. Henry
#10. 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.
O. Henry
#11. My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you.
O. Henry
#12. No friendship is an accident.
O. Henry
#13. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.
O. Henry
#14. 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.
O. Henry
#15. It's an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.
O. Henry
#16. Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside.
O. Henry
#17. 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.
O. Henry
#18. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.
O. Henry
#19. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling - something
O. Henry
#20. Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another.
O. Henry
#21. Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
O. Henry
#22. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far.
O. Henry
#23. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.
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#24. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
O. Henry
#25. In front the sea was spread, a smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning mountains.
O. Henry
#26. 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.
O. Henry
#27. Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
O. Henry
#28. In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places.
O. Henry
#29. 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.
O. Henry
#30. 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.
O. Henry
#31. If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.
O. Henry
#32. By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.
O. Henry
#33. Except in streetcars one should never be unnecessarily rude to a lady.
O. Henry
#34. She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).
O. Henry
#35. 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.
O. Henry
#36. 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)
O. Henry
#37. To a woman nothing seems quite impossible to the powers of the man she worships.
O. Henry
#38. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's.
O. Henry
#39. Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence
O. Henry
#40. 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.
O. Henry
#41. A good story is like a bitter pill, with the sugar coating inside of it.
O. Henry
#42. He studied cities as women study their reflections.
O. Henry
#43. 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
O. Henry
#44. There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.
O. Henry
#45. By nature and doctrines I am addicted to the habit of discovering choice places wherein to feed.
O. Henry
#47. Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.
O. Henry
#48. One dollar and eighty-seven cents.
O. Henry
#49. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
O. Henry
#50. It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.
O. Henry
#51. Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.
O. Henry
#52. She had
become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the
air he breathed
necessary but scarcely noticed.
O. Henry
#53. It is said that love makes the world go 'round - the announcement lacks verification. It's wind from the dinner horn that does it.
O. Henry
#54. It'll be a great place if they ever finish it.
O. Henry
#55. A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
O. Henry
#56. We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.
O. Henry
#57. 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".
O. Henry
#58. 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.
O. Henry
#59. 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.
O. Henry
#60. This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs.
O. Henry
#61. I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or
the color work in a ten-cent magazine.
O. Henry
#62. Bolivar cannot carry double
O. Henry
#63. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather.
O. Henry
#64. Pennies saved one and two at a time
O. Henry
#65. 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
O. Henry
#66. When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard.
O. Henry
#67. 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.
O. Henry
#68. Those whom we first love we seldom marry
O. Henry
#69. It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.
O. Henry
#70. If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life
O. Henry
#71. 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.
O. Henry
#72. 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?
O. Henry
#73. There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.
O. Henry
#74. 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.
O. Henry
#75. 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.
O. Henry
#76. Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.
O. Henry
#77. In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out.
O. Henry
#78. In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in its greatness.
O. Henry
#79. It shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere.
O. Henry
#80. Well, little old Noisyville-on-the Subway is good enough for me.
O. Henry
#81. I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.
O. Henry
#82. A holiday in a new dress-can earth offer anything more enchanting?
O. Henry
#83. Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man.
O. Henry
#84. All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.
O. Henry
#85. 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.
O. Henry
#86. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's.
O. Henry
#87. Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks.It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends - never easy.
O. Henry
#88. There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl.
O. Henry
#89. 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.
O. Henry
#90. 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.
O. Henry
#91. Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides.
O. Henry
#92. Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper.
O. Henry
#93. Write what you like; there is no other rule.
O. Henry
#94. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.
O. Henry
#95. 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.
O. Henry
#96. What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?
O. Henry
#97. 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.
O. Henry
#98. A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.
O. Henry
#99. We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer.
O. Henry
#100. 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.
O. Henry
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