O. Henry Quotes & Sayings

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. — O. Henry

He had become enveloped in the Indian Summer of the Soul. — O. Henry

You can't appreciate home till you've left it, money till it's spent, your wife till she's joined a woman's club, nor Old Glory till you see it hanging on a broomstick on the shanty of a consul in a foreign town. — O. Henry

Those whom we first love we seldom marry — O. Henry

Men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides. — O. Henry

We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. — O. Henry

Bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot not of. — O. Henry

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

There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands. — O. Henry

The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. — O. Henry

Twenty-five years ago the school children used to chant their lessons. The manner of their delivery was a singsong recitative between the utterance of an Episcopal minister and the drone of a tired sawmill. I mean no disrespect. We must have lumber and sawdust. — O. Henry

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"
that's what they sing. — O. Henry

Bolivar cannot carry double — O. Henry

It gives men courage and ambition and the nerve for anything. It has the colour of gold, is clear as a glass and shines after dark as if the sunshine were still in it. — O. Henry

Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. — O. Henry

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience. — O. Henry

Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man. — O. Henry

He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. — O. Henry

Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation. — O. Henry

There'll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee & over to Norfolk for his rolls, & reaches up to Vermont & digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, & then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he'd come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia. — O. Henry

Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. — O. Henry

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature. — O. Henry

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. — O. Henry

A holiday in a new dress-can earth offer anything more enchanting? — O. Henry

Be content with what thou seest; and wait until Time and Experience shall teach thee to find jealousy behind the sweet smile, and hatred under the honeyed word!' "This — O. Henry

Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. — O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. — O. Henry

He studied cities as women study their reflections. — O. Henry

Maybe the hairs on my head were numbered" she went on with a sudden serious sweetness "but nobody could ever count my love for you". — O. Henry

It couldn't have happened anywhere but in little old New York. — O. Henry

Will you buy my hair? — O. Henry

He could talk through twenty cigarettes on any topic that you brought up. And he never sat up when he could lie down; and never stood when he could sit. — O. Henry

I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist.

O'Henry 'The Plutonian Fire' (1905) — O. Henry

A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows. — O. Henry

All of us have to be prevaricators, hypocrites, and liars every day of our lives; otherwise the social structure would fall into pieces the first day. We must act in one another's presence just as we must wear clothes. It is for the best — O. Henry

But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little flat
the ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cozy dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of ambitions
ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else inconsiderable
the mutual help and inspiration; and
overlook my artlessness
stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches at 11 p.m. — O. Henry

Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham. — O. Henry

You sold a story last week," said Pettit, "about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt's .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could - "
"Oh, well," said I, "that's different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn't be noticed until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the papers about it." (from "The Plutonian Fire") — O. Henry

[A]ll of life, as we know it, moves in little, unavailing circles. More justly than to anything else, it can be likened to the game of baseball. Crack! we hit the ball, and away we go. If we earn a run (in life we call it success) we get back to the home plate and sit upon a bench. If we are thrown out, we walk back to the home plate
and sit upon a bench. — O. Henry

Be always decent and right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit. — O. Henry

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war. — O. Henry

Now, girls, if you want to observe a young man hustle out after a pick and shovel, just tell him that your heart is in some other fellow's grave. Young men are grave-robbers by nature. — O. Henry

It's an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak. — O. Henry

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer. — O. Henry

Whenever he saw a dollar in another man's hands he took it as a personal grudge, if he couldn't take it any other way. — O. Henry

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. — O. Henry

In time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches. — O. Henry

This fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul ... its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs. — O. Henry

When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard. — O. Henry

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

East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. — O. Henry

In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in its greatness. — O. Henry

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction. — O. Henry

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

What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it? — O. Henry

Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him. — O. Henry

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

My advice to you, if you should ever be in a hold up, is to line up with the cowards and save your bravery for an occasion when it may be of some benefit to you. — O. Henry

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 — O. Henry

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

When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster ... I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story. — O. Henry

If a person has lived through war, poverty and love, he has lived a full life — O. Henry

In front the sea was spread, a smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning mountains. — O. Henry

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines. — O. Henry

There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American. — O. Henry

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry. — O. Henry

When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair. — O. Henry

According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker.

- The World And The Door — O. Henry

It brings up happy old days when I was only a farmer and not an agriculturist. — O. Henry

There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference. — O. Henry

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man's starving! — O. Henry

I should like to be a periwinkle," said he, mysteriously, "on the top of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo."
This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan. — O. Henry

It is said that love makes the world go 'round - the announcement lacks verification. It's wind from the dinner horn that does it. — O. Henry

Inject a few raisins of conversation into the tasteless dough of existence — O. Henry

In the Big City a man will disappear with the suddenness and completeness of the flame of a candle that is blown out. — O. Henry

Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling - something — O. Henry

The most notable thing about Time is that it is so purely relative. A large amount of reminiscence is, by common consent, conceded to the drowning man; and it is not past belief that one may review an entire courtship while removing one's gloves. — O. Henry

Why, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section. — O. Henry

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

It shall be a duty and a pleasing sport to wander with Momus beneath the tropic stars where Melpomene once stalked austere. — O. Henry

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. — O. Henry

Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper. — O. Henry

No friendship is an accident. — O. Henry

Life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. — O. Henry

It'll be a great place if they ever finish it. — O. Henry

And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. — O. Henry

But how is it now? All we get is orders; and the laws go out of the state. Them legislators set up there at Austin and don't do nothing but makes laws against kerosene oil and schoolbooks being brought into the state. I reckon they was afraid some man would go home some evening after work and light up and get an education and go to work and make laws to repeal aforesaid laws. — O. Henry

Most wonderful of all are words, and how they make friends one with another. — O. Henry

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen - the census taker - and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million. — O. Henry

Pennies saved one and two at a time — O. Henry

It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do. — O. Henry

True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted - golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasures, crowns, and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Sob - when he started back home. — O. Henry

Turn up the lights - I don't want to go home in the dark. — O. Henry

Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks. — O. Henry

Love and large-hearted giving, when added together, can leave deep marks.It is never easy to cover these marks, dear friends - never easy. — O. Henry

Oh, come off your perch!" said the other man, who wore glasses. "Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it. — O. Henry

You'd think New York people was all wise; but no, they can't get a chance to learn. Every thing's too compressed. Even the hay-seeds are bailed hay-seeds. But what else can you expect from a town that's shut off for the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other? — O. Henry

Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts, gas leaks 20 parts, dewdrops gathered in a brickyard at sunrise 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. — O. Henry

By rights you're a king. If I was you, I'd call for a new deal. — O. Henry

History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women. — O. Henry