Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
AGNES REPPLIERNo rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.
More Agnes Repplier Quotes
-
-
If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Humor brings insight and tolerance.
AGNES REPPLIER -
English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.
AGNES REPPLIER -
It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.
AGNES REPPLIER -
I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.
AGNES REPPLIER -
People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be expressed only in language; humor can be developed sufficiently in situation.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.
AGNES REPPLIER -
We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.
AGNES REPPLIER -
The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.
AGNES REPPLIER -
An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.
AGNES REPPLIER -
Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.
AGNES REPPLIER