Edmund Gosse Quotes

• The secret of successful fiction is a continual slight novelty.

  Edmund Gosse

  Successful, Secret, Fiction

  45 Copy quote

• Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful who you blame.

  Edmund Gosse

  Advice, Mind, Blame

  9 Copy quote

• The future comes like an unwelcome guest.

  Edmund Gosse

  Guests, Unwelcome

  Edmund Gosse (1873). “On Viol and Flute”, p.27

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• The past is a funeral gone by.

  Edmund Gosse

  Moving, Past, Funeral

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• 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

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• 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. 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. 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

  "Father and Son".

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• 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

  Edmund Gosse (2012). “Father and Son”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

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