Alice James Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Original sin is my only refuge, I was born bad and I never have recovered — 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. — Alice James

It is an immense loss to have all robust and sustaining expletives refined away from one! At. moments of trial refinement is a feeble reed to lean upon. — Alice James

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. — Alice James

Truly nothing is to be expected except for the unexpected. — Alice James

I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. — Alice James

In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ... So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing. — Alice James

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

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading. — Alice James

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

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. — Alice James

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. — Alice James

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. — Alice James

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

Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity. — Alice James

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. — Alice James

Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumle along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask for? — 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. — Alice James

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 ... — Alice James

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. — Alice James

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

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind. — Alice James

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

How heroic to be able to suppress one's vanity to the extent of confessing that the game is too hard. — Alice James

Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods,
surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes. — Alice James