If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.