Alice James

“You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.”

“I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.”

“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.”

“I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.”

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

“The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.”

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

“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.”

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

“If 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...”

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

“What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.”

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

“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.”