One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
Alice JamesDestitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.
Alice JamesThough I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.
Alice JamesPhysical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.
Alice JamesI think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations.
Alice JamesI make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.
Alice JamesNotwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumle along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for?
Alice JamesThe gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.
Alice JamesHow sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.
Alice JamesI wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.
Alice JamesYou must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.
Alice JamesThe difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?
Alice JamesThe success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape
Alice JamesWhat sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.
Alice JamesWhat one reads, or rather all that comes to us, is surely only of interest and value in proportion as we find ourselves therein, -- form given to what was vague, what slumbered stirred to life.
Alice JamesAh! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by the way?
Alice JamesIf I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich.
Alice James