At a tender age, I commandeered half a quire of foolscap from my father's desk and sat down to write a book. ...I had observed on ...printed fly leaves the words "By the author of, etc." ...So under the title of my prospective work I wrote: By the author of "Les Miserables," "The Woman in White," "Dombey and Son," "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and "Our Life in the Highlands," the last-named being an opus of good Queen Victoria. I had not read all these works but they existed on our bookshelves, and I hoped to produce something worthy of comparison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our life seems not present, so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast- flowing... vigor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We live in a system of approximations. Every end is prospective of some other end, which is also temporary; a round and final succ...ess nowhere. We are encamped in nature, not domesticated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospect...ive symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[When asked, as a prospective Presidential candidate, whether she had ever committed adultery:] No. But then most congresswomen do...n't have 25-year-old lifeguards throwing themselves at their feet around this place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for your friend, my prospective reader, I hope he ignores Fort Sumter, and "Old Abe," and all that; for that is just the most f...atal, and, indeed, the only fatal weapon you can direct against evil ever; for, as long as you know of it, you are particeps criminis. What business have you, if you are an "angel of light," to be pondering over the deeds of darkness, reading the New York Herald, and the like.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Dubliner" seems to me to have some meaning and I doubt whether the same can be said for such words as "Londoner" and "Parisian" b...oth of which have been used by writers as titles. From time to time I see in publishers' lists announcements of books on Irish subjects, so that I think people might be willing to pay for the special odour of corruption which, I hope, floats over my stories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed t...o me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevit...able fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »