Quote

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

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O. Henry
Age: 47 †
Born: 1862
Born: September 11
Died: 1910
Died: June 5
Journalist
Writer
Greensboro
North Carolina
William Sydney Porter
Olivier Henry
Oliver Henry
Conscience
Stinging
Moral
Irritate
Story
Mosquito
Stories
Mosquitoes
Like
Bores
Drop
Bill
Bills
Injects

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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.
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The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.
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Bolivar cannot carry double
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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.
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It's said that love makes the world go around. Let me tell you, the announcement lacks verification. It's the wind from the dinner horn that does it.
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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.
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Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
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Those whom we first love we seldom marry
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We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us.
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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.
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There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
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Greenwich Village... the village of low rents and high arts.
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I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lamp posts and newspaper stands.
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Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces though there is some silly theory of gravitation.
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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.
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A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
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There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it used to. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American.
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It ain't the roads we take it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.
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Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
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History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
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