William Dean Howells

We live, but a world has passed away With the years that perished to make us men.

— William Dean Howells

The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment.

— William Dean Howells

And before you know me gone Eternity and I are one.

— William Dean Howells

Her mouth is a honey-blossom, Lurks a cruel bee that stings.

— William Dean Howells

He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence [...]

— William Dean Howells

See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion; See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious.

— William Dean Howells

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

— William Dean Howells

An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.

— William Dean Howells

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

— William Dean Howells

Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

— William Dean Howells

What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

— William Dean Howells