O. Henry citations

Page 2

“Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.”

“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.”

“Take it from me — he's got the goods.”

“Kerner's father was worth a couple of millions. He was willing to stand for art, but he drew the line at the factory girl. So Kerner disinherited his father and walked out to a cheap studio and lived on sausages for breakfast and on Farroni for dinner.”

“A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.”

“History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.”

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

“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.”

“She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership).”

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

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

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

“Bolivar cannot carry double”

“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.”

“We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs.”