O. Henry Quotes
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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.
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Write what you like; there is no other rule.
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If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.
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We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.
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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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By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal.
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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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It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's.
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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.