Edmund Gosse Quotes
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Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit.
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The past is a funeral gone by.
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I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented.
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I soon discovered that they were absorbed in a silly kind of amorous correspondence with the girls of a neighbouring academy, but " what were all such toys to me?
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In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.
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Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset.
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He had recognized, with reluctance, that holiness was not hereditary, but he continued to hope that it might be compulsive.
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The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else.
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It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had never been weaned from a milk diet.
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He would calculate, by reference to prophecies in the Old and New Testament, the exact date of this event; the date would pass, without the expected Advent, and he would be more than disappointed,—he would be incensed. Then he would understand that he must have made some slight error in calculation, and the pleasures of anticipation would recommence.
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The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years.
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Either he must cease to think for himself; or his individualism must be instantly confirmed, and the necessity of religious independence must be emphasized.
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She was never a tower of strength to me, but at least she was always a lodge in my garden of cucumbers.
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Mr. Hunt was in sympathy with the methods we ourselves were in the habit of using when we painted butterflies and seaweeds, placing perfectly pure pigments side by side, without any nonsense about chiaroscuro.
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He was surrounded by peasants, on whom the teeth of his arguments could find no purchase.
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These had the colourless triteness of a story retold a hundred times. I longed for something new, something that would gratify curiosity and excite surprise.
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Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful who you blame.
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The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.
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The future comes like an unwelcome guest.
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It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse.
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You were thus sailing down the rapid tide of time towards Eternity, without a single authoritative guide (having cast your chart overboard), except what you might fashion and forge on your own anvil,—except what you might guess, in fact.
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What a charming companion, what a delightful parent, what a courteous and engaging friend my Father would have been, and would pre-eminently have been to me, if it had not been for this stringent piety which ruined it all.