The best Bartleby, The Scrivener quotes

Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.

Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby, in a singular mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”

All who know me consider me an eminently safe man. The late John Jacob Astor, a personage little given to poetic enthusiasm, had no hesitation in pronouncing my first grand point to be prudence, my next, method.

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

Bartleby: ‘I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.‘

The truth was, I suppose, that a man of so small an income, could not afford to sport such a lustrous face and a lustrous coat at one and the same time.

As I afterwards learned, the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but, in his pale, unmoving way, silently acquiesced.