Quotes by Alice James

• The difficulty about all this dying, is that you can't tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?
• 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.
• What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.
• You must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man, a few emotions and she is satisfied.
• 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.
• One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
• I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.
• I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more.
• I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.
• 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.