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William Dean Howells Quotes
1837–1920 United States
William Dean Howells (March 1, 1837 – May 11, 1920) was an American realist novelist, literary critic, playwright, and diplomat, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria, and the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day", which was adapted into a 1996 film of the same name.
United States Critics Essayists Journalists Novelists Also known as: Howells, William Dean
Random William Dean Howells quote
15 quotes
We live, but a world has passed away
The Mulberries (1871)
What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.
French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)
The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others.
If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them.
The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.
Their Wedding Journey (1872)
That's what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying.
He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence [...]
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.
My Mark Twain (1910)
See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion;
And before you know me gone
Her mouth is a honey-blossom,
The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright.
Literary Friends and Acquaintance : A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (1900)
An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.
My Literary Passions (1895)
I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand.
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