O. Henry Quotes

But when a sick person begins to feel that he’s going to die, half my work is useless.

He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it.

I hate it as one hates sin or pestilence or — the color work in a ten-cent magazine.

"She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, "parallelogram!" and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder. That"

It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.

"In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places.

Where the smoke cleared, the crystal air, with some of the efficacy of faith, seemed to remove the mountains almost to the sea, bringing them so near that one might count the scarred glades on their wooded sides.

Единственное, что тут можно было сделать, это хлопнуться на старенькую кушетку и зареветь. Именно так Делла и поступила. Откуда напрашивается философский вывод, что жизнь состоит из слез, вздохов и улыбок, причем вздохи преобладают.

The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its name. The hall of the association in Orchard street was fitted out with muscle- making inventions. With the fibres thus builded up the members were wont to engage the police and rival social and athletic organisations in joyous combat. Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night hop with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining influence and as an efficient screen.

Pull up the shades so I can see New York. I don't want to go home in the dark.

It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

If man knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they’d never marry.

"action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I'll bet that if he had used the phrases: "Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward — or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet," and "Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my upraised digit" — I'll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination."

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

The gray ghost that sometimes peeps through the rings of smoke is that of slain old King Convention. Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in slavery.