Alice james Quotes

“In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho’ I was not conscious of the necessity until ’67 or ’68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end....So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing.”

“The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.”

“One has a greater sense of degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.”

“The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.”

“Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?”

“Though I have no productive worth I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.”

“Truly nothing is to be expected but the unexpected.”

“It is so comical to hear oneself called old even at ninety I suppose!”

“If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...”

“One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.”