Quotes from Alice James

How 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.

Though I have no productive worth I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

What 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.

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

It is so comical to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

The 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.

When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that.

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Ah! Those strange people who have the courage to be unhappy! Are they unhappy, by the way?

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

The 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.

The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?