O. Henry (1862 – 1910)
Pen name of William Sydney Porter, a short-story writer famous for his use of twist endings.
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.
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.
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.
Take it from me — he's got the goods.
Busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper.
The magi, as you know, were wise men — wonderfully wise men — who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. 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. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York.
History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
I hated Kerner, and one day I met him and we became friends. He was young and gloriously melancholy because his spirits were so high and life had so much in store for him. Yes, he was almost riotously sad. That was his youth. When a man begins to be hilarious in a sorrowful way you can bet a million that he is dyeing his hair.
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.
Broadway — the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.
It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.
What is the world at its best but a little round field of the moving pictures with two walking together in it?
The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.