O. Henry Quotes
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History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
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By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.
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Write what you like; there is no other rule.
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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.
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I have been called 'The American De Maupassant.' Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don't like to be compared to a filthy writer.
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Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving!
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We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.
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Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside.
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In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.
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You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a women's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town.
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If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.
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She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed--necessary but scarcely noticed.
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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.
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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.
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Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper.
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One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
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Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.
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If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's.
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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.
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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.
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It is said that love makes the world go 'round - the announcement lacks verification. It's wind from the dinner horn that does it.
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What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?
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It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.
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He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienist and the florist.