Top 100 Howells Quotes
#1. For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.
Helen Keller
#2. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells.
Mark Twain
#3. He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.
Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.
Craig Raine
#5. Forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The
William Dean Howells
#6. Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.
William Dean Howells
#7. You have to live inside each beautiful or terrible thing as it happens to you, because the present may be all you've got.
Amanda Howells
#9. You can play the part for so long, wear the mask, say what people expect you to say. Fight for as long as there is air in your lungs. Fly if you have wings. But you can never be free from someone who won't let you go.
Debbie Howells
#12. If you kept your light inside of yourself too long, it might burn out altogether.
Amanda Howells
#13. The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple is a far nobler property than the finest intellect. Satan has a fine intellect, but not the image of God.
William Dean Howells
#14. I was fourteen when I fell in love with a goddess. Goddesses have that effect, even on teenagers.
Debbie Howells
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.
William Dean Howells
#18. The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
William Dean Howells
#19. Simon nodded. "You need your beauty sleep."
"Do I?" I said coolly.
"I didn't mean," Simon stuttered. "I meant ... you're a girl and all."
"Thanks for telling me,
Amanda Howells
#21. There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
William Dean Howells
#23. But there's that thing with secrets, too, how they take over your head, feeding on your every thought, growing bigger all the time until the day comes they're so heavy you can't walk.
Debbie Howells
#24. You think you know everything that's happening around you. But you can't always see clearly when your standing right there in the picture.
Amanda Howells
#25. In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.
William Dean Howells
#26. In those moments it's hard to remember that an angry voice is an invisible thing incapable of drawing blood.
Amanda Howells
#27. The promises of God are equal to current coin. Therefore, I must act on the promises as I would if I actually had the cash.
Rees Howells
#30. It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.
William Dean Howells
#33. I'm a realist," I replied stubbornly, "not a romantic. Romantics
are always disappointed."
"Maybe they're disappointed because they're always surrounded
by realists." Simon countered.
Amanda Howells
#34. 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
#35. Living faith is above circumstances; no delays can discourage it, no loss of friends or depression in trade can touch it.
Rees Howells
#38. They're on a crash course to nowhere. But you, my lady friend, you're a black hole. You've sucked me in, and now there's no escape ...
Amanda Howells
#39. 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
#40. It is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit.
William Dean Howells
#41. I've wondered since if you can ever truly read a face. It's too easy to see what you so desperately want to see, even if it isn't there. I knew that.
Debbie Howells
#42. Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.
William Dean Howells
#44. The novelist might be greater possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.
William Dean Howells
#46. 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
#47. If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank.
William Dean Howells
#50. That's how birthdays were in our house. All hateful charades of pretty clothes, expensive presents, and ugly words . . .
Debbie Howells
#51. 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
#52. The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.
William Dean Howells
#53. I'll see ya," I said in a neutral tone. I wasn't sure whether to
be annoyed by Simon or by myself, or by both of us. "I can walk
home," I added as Simon trudged alongside me to the walkway
leading up to Wind Song.
"I can see that. You're very talented at it.
Amanda Howells
#54. Out of the fragrant heart of bloom, The bobolinks are singing; Out of the fragrant heart of bloom The apple-tree whispers to the room, Why art thou but a nest of gloom While the bobolinks are singing?
William Dean Howells
#55. See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious.
William Dean Howells
#56. Suddenly your whole life is like a car crash, no brakes, gaining momentum, piling up behind you. Your mistakes, missed opportunities, all the time you've wasted, a twisted, rusting heap of scrap metal that can't be salvaged. Overwhelming you. Crushing you.
Debbie Howells
#57. If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet
a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences.
William Dean Howells
#58. Even if there was something noble about having faith, it still hurt when you lost it.
Amanda Howells
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. It's astonishing how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better.
William Dean Howells
#62. #anks for the swim. You are a majestic swimmer," Simon said
as we neared the walkway to Wind Song.
"You talk a lot of crap, you know that?"
"I thank you for appreciating my verbal stylings," Simon replied,
with a formal bow.
Amanda Howells
#63. 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
#64. If you stay on the sidelines of the here and now then your future will only ever be a pale version of a dream you never had the courage to experience.
Amanda Howells
#65. 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
#66. You know, how there are some people who have no time for small things? Pettiness, I mean. In the way they let things go - because whatever huge, life-changing thing happened to them gave them a perspective most of us can't ever have.
Debbie Howells
#67. 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
#68. A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.
William Dean Howells
#69. It was one of many times I tried to save her. But by the time I did, it was too late.
Debbie Howells
#70. That's when I know they've never lost someone. If they had, they'd understand. That you always miss them. That the pain doesn't go. That life stops.
Debbie Howells
#71. A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality.
William Dean Howells
#72. An acre of performance is worth the whole Land of promise
James Howell
#73. 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
#74. Death casts its shadow, leaving our hearts sad and tainting our world with fear.
Debbie Howells
#75. After dreaming about being in love for so long I finally got what it meant to actually be in it.
Amanda Howells
#76. See what fun it is to do what Simon Says? Simon teased,
drawing closer toward me.
Amanda Howells
#77. I loved your world, Noah. It was a magical place, where there were stars and love, and there was hope. Hope. I don't think you know how it is not to have that. I stole some of yours. It was beautiful, but there were too many secrets between us, and I always knew I'd have to give it back.
Debbie Howells
#78. 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.
William Dean Howells
#79. Deliverance is always found on 'the mount'; living faith must first prove to God that it has taken His word and promise for victory.
Rees Howells
#80. 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
#81. Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.
William Dean Howells
#82. The surest way to hurt yourself is to give up on love, just because it didn't
work out the first time.
Amanda Howells
#83. If you don't have any dreams then they won't come true.
Amanda Howells
#84. You may live in a crowd but you meet God and face eternity alone
Rees Howells
#85. 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
#89. I want to thank him. For showing me that life is full of love and hope and goodness, even when there's the most unbearable sadness. And those, more than money and fame and celebrity, are what make people precious.
Debbie Howells
#90. 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
#91. She had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.
William Dean Howells
#92. Putting yourself at risk ... that was the only path to anything meaningful. The biggest risk was in not taking a risk.
Amanda Howells
#93. The Lord always shows you all the difficulties when He is going to do anything through you.
Rees Howells
#94. No work of God can become established unless it goes through the fire.
Rees Howells
#95. She was so thin I could probably deck her on the side of the head with a pack of Marlboro Lights and she'd hemmorrhage internally.
Amanda Howells
#97. I discover, too, that grief is different to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.
Debbie Howells
#98. The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
William Dean Howells
#99. People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.
William Dean Howells
#100. What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
William Dean Howells
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