All Quotes by O. Henry
“We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.”
“We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.”
“If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.”
“Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.”
“Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.”
“What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?”
“Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's.”
“Turn up the lights — I don't want to go home in the dark.”
“A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.”
“A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.”
“Take it from me — he's got the goods.”
“Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."”
“One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.”
“There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.”
“If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.”
“The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home.”
“Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.”
“The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.”
“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.”
“Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions. He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner.”
“Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.”
“It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.”
“Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper.”
“She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm — always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety.”
“If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York.”
“History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.”
“If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.”
“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.”
“She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York.”
“It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.”
“Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.”
“Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.”
“If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.”
“If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.”