Quote

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Agnes Repplier

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Agnes Repplier
Age: 92 †
Born: 1858
Born: April 1
Died: 1950
Died: December 15
Biographer
Essayist
Writer
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
Character
Incident
Good
Incidents
Always
Lays
Never
Pick
Picks
Novel
Reading
Part

More quotes by Agnes Repplier

Image
Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Necessity knows no Sunday.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying only in so far as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.
Agnes Repplier
Image
By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.
Agnes Repplier
Image
A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Bargaining is essential to the life of the world but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.
Agnes Repplier
Image
When the milk of human kindness turns sour, it is a singularly unpalatable draught.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities.
Agnes Repplier
Image
We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
Agnes Repplier
Image
It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.
Agnes Repplier
Image
the tea-hour is the hour of peace ... strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle - a tranquilizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.
Agnes Repplier
Image
A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.
Agnes Repplier
Image
I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.
Agnes Repplier
Image
the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.
Agnes Repplier
Image
There is an optimism which nobly anticipates the eventual triumph of great moral laws, and there is an optimism which cheerfully tolerates unworthiness.
Agnes Repplier
Image
if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.
Agnes Repplier
Image
There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join
Agnes Repplier
Image
Life is so full of miseries, minor and major they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another's attention to their presence.
Agnes Repplier
Image
Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so much to acquire it as to bestow it, is the most animated of American traits.
Agnes Repplier
Image
The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.
Agnes Repplier