Edmund Gosse famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Successful #Secret #Novelty
The past is a funeral gone by.
-- Edmund Gosse

#Moving #Past #Funeral
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

#Littles #Might #Trouble
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

#Thinking #Errors #Parent
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. Â 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. Â A state in which conversation exists not, is for me an air too empty of oxygen for my lungs to breathe it.
-- Edmund Gosse

#Air #Cells #Oxygen
Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful who you blame.
-- Edmund Gosse

#Advice #Mind #Blame
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

#War #Years #Poetry
The future comes like an unwelcome guest.
-- Edmund Gosse

#Guests #Unwelcome

We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.
I must stress here the point that I appreciate clarity, order, meaning, structure, rationality: they are necessary to whatever provisional stability we have, and they can be the agents of gradual and successful change.
Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks... With enough of us, around the world, weâ€™ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge â€” weâ€™ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
For most Americans, my Chinese music feels like a novelty and it's not what it is for me,
Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable.
Where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity.
The beautiful always retains the freshness of novelty, while the astonishing soon grow tiresome.
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.
The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

Edmund Gosse famous quotes

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