WILLIAM MCFEE

There is nothing like an odor to stir memories.

Terrible and sublime thought, that every moment is supreme for some man and woman, every hour the apotheosis of some passion!

Fear, born of that stern matron, Responsibility.

If fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow.

A young man must let his ideas grow, not be continually rooting them up to see how they are getting on.

It is so much easier to tell intimate things in the dark.

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

One must choose between Obscurity with Efficiency, and Fame with its inevitable collateral of Bluff.

People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight.

An Englishman never takes his collar off when he is writing. How can you expect him to show you his soul?

Woman dwell always in the palace of unpalatable truth and never by any chance is there a magic talisman to save them from their destiny. Speech is their ultimate need. We men exist for them only in so far as we can be described.

The artist isn't particularly keen on getting a thing done, as you call it. He gets his pleasure out of doing it, playing with it, fooling with it, if you like. The mere completion of it is an incident.

There is a pleasure unknown to the landsman in reading at sea.

There is far too much talk of love and grief benumbing the faculties, turning the hair gray, and destroying a man's interest in his work. Grief has made many a man look younger.

The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation that cancels out without warning when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.

There is nothing like a start, and being born, however pessimistic one may become in later years, is undeniably a start.

A trouble is a trouble, and the general idea, in the country, is to treat it as such, rather than to snatch the knotted cords from the hand of God and deal out murderous blows.

Wives invariably flourish when deserted; ... it is the deserting male, the reckless idealist rushing about the world seeking a non-existent felicity, who often ends in disaster.

It is extraordinary how many emotional storms one may weather in safety if one is ballasted with ever so little gold.

The artist in his teens who is happy is a charlatan. Life comes bursting in all around lis too suddenly, too crudely, too cruelly, for happiness.

It may be that, while we plodding realists go on, for ever preoccupied with our daily chores, abstracting a microscopic pleasure from each microscopic duty, your true romantic has the truer vision, and beholds, afar off, in all its lurid splendour and terrible proportions, the piquant adventure we call life.

Fear, born of the stern matron Responsibility, sits on one's shoulders like some heavy imp of darkness, and one is preoccupied and, possibly, cantankerous.

The wives who are not deserted, but who have to feed and clothe and comfort and scold and advise, are the true objects of commiseration; wives whose existence is given over to a ceaseless vigil of cantankerous affection.

There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.