The Diary of Alice James Quotes

“Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?”
― Alice James, The Diary of Alice James

“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.”
― Alice James, The Diary of Alice James

“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.”
― Alice James, The Diary of Alice James

“A young couple — bride eighteen, man twenty-two — came here for their honeymoon. The day after the wedding, he was found to have scarlet fever, and in two days he was dead.

How cruel it is when pain and sorrow come to young things, — they are so helpless; what can they do with it? What a rush of desire to go to them and wrap them about in one's long-accustomedness until the little bewildered soul has woven for itself some sort of casing.”
― Alice James, The Diary of Alice James

“How profoundly grateful I am for
the temperament which saves me from the wretched fate of
those poor creatures who never find their bearings, but are
tossed like dried leaves hither, thither and yon, at the mercy of
every event which o'ertakes them; who feel no shame at being
vanquished, or at crying out at the common lot of pain and
sorrow; who never dimly suspect that the only thing which
survives is the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life
brings to us.”
― Alice James, The Diary of Alice James