Bret Harte
Bret Harte
Francis Bret Hartewas an American short story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 August 1836
CityAlbany, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Your voices break and falter in the darkness, Break, falter, and are still.
If, of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, It might have been,' More sad are these we daily see: 'It is, but hadn't ought to be!'
Nobody shoulders a rifle in defense of a boarding house.
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.
The dominant expression of a child is gravity.
But still when the mists of doubt prevail, And we lie becalmed by the shores of age, We hear from the misty troubled shore The voce of children gone before. Drawing the soul to its anchorage.
It may be broadly stated that.....of all animals kept for the recreation of mankind the horse is alone capable of exciting a passion that shall be absolutely hopeless.
Love differs from all the other contagious diseases: the last time a man is exposed to it, he takes it most readily, and has it the worst!
Besides writing, I have been teaching myself to 'develop' my own photographic plates, and I haven't a stick of clothing or an exposed finger that isn't stained. I sit for hours in a dark-room feeling as if I were a very elderly Faust at some dreadful incantation, and come out of it, blinding at the light, like a Bastille prisoner. And yet I am not successful!
The creator who could put a cancer in a believer's stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.
For the glory born of Goodness Never dies, And its flag is not half-masted In the skies.
Perhaps there is no gift of nature that requires as little exertion on the part of the owner as personal beauty. I am not certain but that it is this very absence of effort which excites our admiration.
The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.
A bird in the hand is a certainty, but a bird in the bush may sing.