Gosse Quotes & Sayings

Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. — Hilary Mantel

I was much affected by the internal troubles of the Punch family; I thought that with a little more tact on the part of Mrs. Punch and some restraint held over a temper, naturally violent, by Mr. Punch, a great deal of this sad misunderstanding might have been prevented. — Edmund Gosse

The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty. — Edmund Gosse

Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble: 'Once upon a time!' ... I can but think that my parents were in error thus to exclude the imaginary from my outlook upon facts. They desired to make me truthful; the tendency was to make me positive and sceptical. Had they wrapped me in the soft folds of supernatural fancy, my mind might have been longer content to follow their traditions in an unquestioning spirit. — Edmund Gosse

Be more attentive to what successful people have to say about all the opportunity around you. Anything important - which takes only two minutes to point out - will exceed most people's attention span by at least a minute and a half. Learn to pay attention for two minutes at a time - and you will see more opportunity than you know what to do with. — Ernie J Zelinski

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness. — William Hazlitt

Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge. — Shoshana Zuboff

In order to get meat, we have to kill. And we are certainly not entitled to any other milk except the mother's milk in our infancy. — Mahatma Gandhi

The immediate success of the war poem anthologies ... proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse ... There has never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which has tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as has been poured forth over Great Britain during the last three years. — Edmund Gosse

Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful who you blame. — Edmund Gosse

You're staring blankly at the fifties now. I'm thirty-ish. Once you were my teacher, my master and I was your student, your apprentice. College years long gone and a decade between us. I think of you every winter and my heart still stops dead, my mouth opening and shutting as if you were still here. I lost something when I found you, something ancient. — Abigail George

But stay; suppose you just transport yourself (in imagination) to Alabama, and spend the day with me. I will be your cicerone, will point out to you all the birds and insects, and tell you "all about 'em;" and, as Hood's schoolboy says, "I'll show you the wasp's nest, and everything that can make you comfortable. — Philip Henry Gosse

The man who satisfies a ceaseless intellectual curiousity probably squeezes more out of life in the long run than anyone else. — Edmund Gosse

The past is a funeral gone by. — Edmund Gosse

if they believe that their fortunes are inversely correlated with the foreigners' fortunes, that the foreigners have to lose for them to win - then their theology will probably be less inclusive. Let's — Robert Wright

The future comes like an unwelcome guest. — Edmund Gosse

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick

The nearest approach to the infallible in literary judgment is represented in the colossal work of the teacher of all these three [Edmund Gosse, Edward Dowden and George Saintsbury], the greatest critic that ever lived - not an Englishman, but a Frenchman, the wonderful Sainte-Beuve. — Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

When you lie down on your bed to sleep, remember with thanksgiving the blessings and the providence of God. — Anthony The Great

In mature years I have always been gregarious, a lover of my kind, dependent upon the company of friends for the very pulse of moral life. To be marooned, to be shut up in a solitary cell, to inhabit a lighthouse, or to camp alone in a forest, these have always seemed to me afflictions too heavy to be borne, even in imagination. A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it. — Edmund Gosse

A President must call on many persons
some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office. — Hyeonseo Lee

I've been very lucky enough to do all kinds of movies. All the movies that I've done have been very different, and all the characters I've done have been very different. I feel very lucky to have been able to do the movies that I've done. — Dakota Fanning

Her husband sat silently while she talked, his hands fisted together, his half-smile set in concrete; he looked wisely down at the tablecloth. So this is marriage, I thought: this shared tedium, this twitchiness, and those little powdery runnels forming to the sides of the nose. — Margaret Atwood

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father. — Vivian Gornick

Mel's Diner in L.A. - they are my favorite hamburgers. I could eat there every day. They are ridiculous. — Liam Hemsworth

Sin looked over at Boyd through sleepy looking, heavy lidded eyes. "Callate la boca, blanquito."
Hearing Sin speak Spanish didn't help any; he sounded especially sexy when he was drawling those words fluidly in his low, velvety voice. "What does that mean?" he asked, half with an edge and half just curious.
Full lips turned up into a small smirk and Sin raised an eyebrow at him before turning back to the window. "It's a secret."
"Putain de beau gosse," Boyd muttered under his breath in mild annoyance, flipping forward several pages. — Santino Hassell