Life
Born into a wealthy and intellectually active family, Alice James soon developed the psychological and physical problems that would end her life at age 43. The youngest of five children, she lived with her parents until their deaths in 1882, when she was 33. She taught history from 1873 to 1876 for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a Boston-based correspondence school for women which was founded by Anna Ticknor. James never married and instead sought affection from her brothers and female friends. By 1882 she had suffered at least two major breakdowns and would experience several more before her death from breast cancer.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“‘So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre,”
—Edmund Spenser (1552?–1599)
“I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the “mainstream” culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn’t think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)