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It's time to start living the life you've imagined. -- Henry James
Had passed between them on this score wasn't so and could never be. Later on, through his mother, I had his version of that, but I may remark that I gave it no credit. Poor Mrs. Nettlepoint, on the other hand, was of course to give it all. I was almost capable, after the girl had left me, of -- Henry James
Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. -- Henry James
I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience - or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy. -- Henry James
However British you may be, I am more British still. -- Henry James
All these people - the people of the English mother's side - had been of condition more or less eminent; yet with oddities and disparities that had often since made Maria, thinking them over, wonder what they really quite rhymed to. It -- Henry James
She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation. -- Henry James
It isn't a question of any beauty,' said Maggie; 'it's only a question of the quantity of truth.' 'Oh the quantity of truth!' the Prince richly though ambiguously murmured. -- Henry James
When I am wicked I am in high spirits. -- Henry James
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. -- Henry James
Make up to a good one and marry here, and your life will become much more interesting. -- Henry James
One need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible to the charm of an English country church ... -- Henry James
He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart. -- Henry James
It's very silly," she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it. -- Henry James
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense? -- Henry James
Do you know I sometimes think that I'm a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door. -- Henry James
He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts
a few of them
which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures. -- Henry James
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test. -- Henry James
Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of. -- Henry James
I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob. -- Henry James
Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation. -- Henry James
I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better."
The lady gave a discriminating smile.
"I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments. -- Henry James
She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her -- Henry James
Impression of having seen me before. It was not till afterwards that I thought this rather characteristically dull of him. I drew him far away - I -- Henry James
I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor. -- Henry James
When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in. -- Henry James
His physiognomy had an air of requesting your attention, which it rewarded or not, according to the charm you found in a blue eye of remarkable fixedness and a jaw of somewhat angular mold, which is supposed to bespeak resolution. -- Henry James
She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities. -- Henry James
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. -- Henry James
furnished, but by no means decorated, -- Henry James
It wouldn't be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them --it seemed really the way to live --the version that met their convenience. -- Henry James
Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form -- Henry James
What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form. -- Henry James
Art without life is a poor affair. -- Henry James
People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course
with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here
to keep an eye on the fleeting hour. -- Henry James
Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not 'dressed,' and long fine hands which were
possibly
not clean. -- Henry James
On so short an acquaintance remains shut up in his breast. His mother, I know, went to his door -- Henry James
The more you know the more unhappy you are -- Henry James
I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself. -- Henry James
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her. -- Henry James
The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself. -- Henry James
Well," said Winterbourne, "when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place. Flirting is a purely American custom; it doesn't exist here. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli, and without your mother - " "Gracious! -- Henry James
It's exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity. -- Henry James
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare. -- Henry James
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character? -- Henry James
Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness ... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. -- Henry James
Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. -- Henry James
[A happy ending is] a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks. -- Henry James
Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicised her personal pronouns. -- Henry James
Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations - unless indeed we call it a simplicity! - that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back. -- Henry James
Sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company - that at the eleventh -- Henry James
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. -- Henry James
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process. -- Henry James
You think too much.'
'I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches
a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown. -- Henry James
Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language. -- Henry James
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them. -- Henry James
Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline - there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less. -- Henry James
I don't do it!" I sobbed in despair; "I don't save or shield them! It's far worse than I dreamed - they're lost!" VIII -- Henry James
The passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object. -- Henry James
And much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton. -- Henry James
Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? -- Henry James
He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn't make out very well what it conveyed. Then he bent over his mother, kissing her. "My news isn't particularly satisfactory. I'm going for you." "Oh you humbug!" she replied. But she was of course delighted. CHAPTER -- Henry James
When Milly smiled it was a public event - when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They -- Henry James
The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of. -- Henry James
It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness - that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast. -- Henry James
It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The -- Henry James
When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself. -- Henry James
It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. -- Henry James
True admiration," said Mrs. Keith, "is one half respect and the other half self-denial. -- Henry James
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do! -- Henry James
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme. -- Henry James
I don't know what's the matter with you," she observed to him once; "but I suspect you're a great humbug. -- Henry James
Muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, and then I said: "I think you mentioned last night a name I know - that of Mr. Porterfield." "Oh no I didn't! -- Henry James
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world. -- Henry James
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. -- Henry James
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own. -- Henry James
Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate -- Henry James
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe. -- Henry James
I keep a band of music in my ante-room," he said once to her. "It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within. -- Henry James
The practice of "reviewing" ... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism. -- Henry James
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. -- Henry James
The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases ... there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood. -- Henry James
Since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate. -- Henry James
She [was] ... one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining
minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued clusters of confessionals at St. Peters. -- Henry James
The increasing seriousness of things, then that's the great opportunity of jokes. -- Henry James
Why it would be a pleasure," I replied rather foolishly. "Do you mean for you?" "Well, yes - call -- Henry James
[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you. -- Henry James
Observe perpetually! -- Henry James
Don't underestimate the value of irony - it is extremely valuable. -- Henry James
I used to call her, in my stupidity - for want of anything better - a dove -- Henry James
It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. -- Henry James
Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater. -- Henry James
I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did. -- Henry James
You are good for nothing unless you are clever. -- Henry James
I don't see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don't want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do. -- Henry James
He has depths of silence - which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself - never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never. She -- Henry James
If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles. -- Henry James
Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked. -- Henry James
The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense. -- Henry James
This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They -- Henry James
The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint. -- Henry James
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things. -- Henry James
There was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other ... -- Henry James
She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her. -- Henry James
Our relation, all round, exists
it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it -- Henry James
She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis. -- Henry James
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. -- Henry James
She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul. -- Henry James
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. -- Henry James
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. -- Henry James
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see
that's my idea of happiness. -- Henry James
The fatal futility of Fact. -- Henry James
Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention. -- Henry James
One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable - embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? -- Henry James
His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin. -- Henry James
Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast
so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech. -- Henry James
If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children - ?" "We -- Henry James
I'm yours for ever
for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours. -- Henry James
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid. -- Henry James
The thing was the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was - the implication here was complete. Not -- Henry James
She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. -- Henry James
Er smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it. -- Henry James
I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. -- Henry James
One never said the things one wanted - one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something. -- Henry James
Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! -- Henry James
It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers. -- Henry James
She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead -- Henry James
Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates. -- Henry James
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn't, and what one "would" have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things. -- Henry James
He had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days. -- Henry James
You're like a picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against the wall. -- Henry James
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. -- Henry James
She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment. -- Henry James
secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who would have sacrificed her marriage to him on so short an acquaintance remains -- Henry James
His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity. He -- Henry James
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes. -- Henry James
She envied the security of valuable 'pieces' which change by no hair's breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty[.] -- Henry James
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie. -- Henry James
A family is a little world within doors; the miniature resemblance of the great worls without -- Henry James
It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. -- Henry James
Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out. -- Henry James
She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action. -- Henry James
Though I couldn't make out what she was talking of I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one's imagination.
("Sir Edmund Orme") -- Henry James
... the high brutality of good intentions ... -- Henry James
Mr. Longdon gave a headshake that was both sad and sharp. "It's all wrong. But YOU'RE all right!" he added in a different tone as he walked hastily away. -- Henry James
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? -- Henry James
It's out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It's never wrong to do that." She -- Henry James
Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there. -- Henry James
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS. -- Henry James
Sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. -- Henry James
Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine. -- Henry James
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it. -- Henry James
Her memory's your love. You want no other. -- Henry James
How in the world
when what is such knowledge but suffering? -- Henry James
Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes
once they had gone a certain length
that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. -- Henry James
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant. -- Henry James
Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible! -- Henry James
To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel. -- Henry James
I'm a perfectly equipped failure. ( ... ) 'Thank goodness you're a failure- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you- look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour? -- Henry James
But the blots, Turkey," intimated I. "True,-but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age-even if it blot the page-is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old. -- Henry James
Sorrow comes in great waves ... but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. -- Henry James
... a prudent archer has always a second bowstring -- Henry James
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance. -- Henry James
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part. -- Henry James
Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice - elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated. -- Henry James
You decline?" he cried, almost defiantly. " 'Decline' isn't the word. A man doesn't decline an insult. -- Henry James
Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes. -- Henry James
My envy's not dangerous; it wouldn't hurt a mouse. -- Henry James
It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own). -- Henry James
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process. -- Henry James
She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur. -- Henry James
What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one's self? -- Henry James
The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species. -- Henry James
Never say you know the last word about any human heart. -- Henry James
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures. -- Henry James
We must for dear life make our own counter-realities. -- Henry James
The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration. -- Henry James
the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried. It -- Henry James
She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticize would be a peculiarly discreditable act. -- Henry James
Deep experience is never peaceful. -- Henry James
Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. -- Henry James
Nevertheless, he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie. -- Henry James
Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic. -- Henry James
She had never yet encountered a personage so exotic, and she always felt more at ease in the presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was inqiuitous. -- Henry James
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. -- Henry James
- Do you know I love you ?
- I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not ! -- Henry James
It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else. -- Henry James
You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left. -- Henry James
There is always a place for chance in things. -- Henry James
I'll piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal of them," said Nora. "I'll let you know how they taste. -- Henry James
You're a very nice girl, but I wish you'd flirt with me, and me only. -- Henry James
I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated. -- Henry James
Asked. "Here he comes, he'll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend to." Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white flannel and carrying a large fan. "Well, my dear, have you decided?" his -- Henry James
believed he had roamed all over the globe - he would certainly have learned how to manage. None the less, in fine, I was very glad to show Mrs. Nettlepoint I thought of her. With my long absence I had lost sight -- Henry James
She had driven in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he signally felt. He -- Henry James
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. -- Henry James
There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. -- Henry James
I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? -- Henry James
Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. -- Henry James
You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it. -- Henry James
Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. -- Henry James
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live. -- Henry James
The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. -- Henry James
There are no themes so human as those that reflect the closeness of bliss to bale. -- Henry James
Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it. -- Henry James
Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew. -- Henry James
Must excuse him - he should have to go back to the club. He would return in half an hour - or in less. He walked -- Henry James
Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness. -- Henry James
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it. -- Henry James
I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live ... -- Henry James
The Brighton air used of old to make plain girls pretty and pretty girls prettier still - I don't know whether it works the spell now.
("Sir Edmund Orme") -- Henry James
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. -- Henry James
Great statesmen oughtn't to waltz. -- Henry James
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. -- Henry James
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals. -- Henry James
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box. -- Henry James
I'll watch with you. -- Henry James
Definite settlement of the question. From the deck, where I merely turned round and looked, I saw the light of another summer -- Henry James
I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will. -- Henry James
It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games -- Henry James
When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. -- Henry James
It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep. -- Henry James
It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be. -- Henry James
she freely admitted that of old she had been a little mad, and now she pretended to be perfectly sane. -- Henry James
Things are always different than what they might be ... If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything. -- Henry James
I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like. -- Henry James
finished. I had to tell -- Henry James
Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with. -- Henry James
He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition ... -- Henry James
Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions. -- Henry James
There's no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won't say that if you refuse me you'll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose. -- Henry James
I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet. -- Henry James
Between nine and ten, at last, in the high clear picture--he was moving in these days, as in a gallery, from clever canvas to clever canvas--he drew a long breath: it was so presented to him from the first that the spell of his luxury wouldn't be broken. -- Henry James
Her real offense was having a mind of her own. -- Henry James
I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected. -- Henry James
In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. -- Henry James
Little and then gone back. Miss Mavis hadn't turned up - and she didn't turn up. The stewardess began to look for her - she hadn't been seen on deck or in the saloon. Besides, she wasn't dressed - not to show herself; all her clothes were in her -- Henry James
And the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face. -- Henry James
every one" was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. The heat was insufferable -- Henry James
There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding. -- Henry James
Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation - in the face now of Jim's silence in particular - but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? -- Henry James
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself. -- Henry James
doubtless not singular that the ladies from Merrimac Avenue -- Henry James
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease. -- Henry James
He escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable. -- Henry James
An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue -- Henry James
Houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, -- Henry James
We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. -- Henry James
I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. -- Henry James
England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head. -- Henry James
It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools. -- Henry James
Ah darling, goodness, I think, never brought any one out. Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people IN. -- Henry James
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes. -- Henry James
Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common - having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich. -- Henry James
The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight. -- Henry James
Some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. -- Henry James
A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost. -- Henry James
And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved. -- Henry James
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces. -- Henry James
Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea. -- Henry James
If Quint - on your remonstrance at the time you speak of - was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. -- Henry James
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? -- Henry James
To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large. -- Henry James
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be? -- Henry James
Is that another sort of joke?" asked the old man. "You've no excuse for being bored anywhere. When I was your age I had never heard of such a thing. -- Henry James
You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose. -- Henry James
The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth!" But our realities are what has brought us together. We're beaten brothers in arms. -- Henry James
But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know - -- Henry James
Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things. -- Henry James
Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in the background. -- Henry James
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself. -- Henry James
I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do. -- Henry James
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong. -- Henry James
There was a dumb misery about him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a woman is angry when she has been in the wrong. -- Henry James
It seemed to him that he both knew too much to imagine [the child's] simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle. -- Henry James
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure. -- Henry James
Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President. -- Henry James
Madame Merle was very appreciative; she liked almost everything, including the English rain. "There is always a little of it, and never too much at once," she said; "and it never wets you, and it always smells good. -- Henry James
Ten o'clock!" "What does it matter when my things are put up?" the young man said. "There's no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm waiting for a telegram - that will settle -- Henry James
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. -- Henry James
Front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in -- Henry James
What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas? -- Henry James
I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them
I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say. -- Henry James
Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination. -- Henry James
What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. -- Henry James
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. -- Henry James
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history. -- Henry James
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire. -- Henry James
The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times. -- Henry James
She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. -- Henry James
Changing the form of one's mission's almost as difficult as changing the shape of one's nose: there they are, each, in the middle of one's face and one's character
one has to begin too far back. -- Henry James
One is oneself a fine consequence. -- Henry James
I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin. -- Henry James
The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said. -- Henry James
People are free to find out the best and the worst of me! -- Henry James
They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough. -- Henry James
Typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She -- Henry James
The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance
all strewn with crumpled playbills. -- Henry James
More charming than that over there, you know! She made me very welcome, but her son had told her about the Patagonia, for which she was sorry, as this would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and mainly confined to her -- Henry James
Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace. -- Henry James
It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her. -- Henry James
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints. -- Henry James
Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression. -- Henry James
By the time she had grown sharper, ... , she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play. -- Henry James
You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground. -- Henry James
Under the long and discurtained ordeal of the morrow's dawn, that -- Henry James
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter. -- Henry James
You were reserved for my future -- Henry James
There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort. -- Henry James
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live. -- Henry James
base menial?" "As -- Henry James
She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. -- Henry James
She had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality. -- Henry James
My first impulse is always to behave, about everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear them - I really like them. They're quite my element. -- Henry James
Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven. -- Henry James
Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people. -- Henry James
Fast ones, if you're impatient." She was silent a little after which she brought out: "Oh I guess it'll be fast enough! -- Henry James
Was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk. -- Henry James
Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there! -- Henry James
Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind. -- Henry James
Until you try, you don't know what you can't do. -- Henry James
Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong. -- Henry James
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar. -- Henry James
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it. -- Henry James
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him. -- Henry James
Strether wondered, desiring justice. "They seem - all the women - very harmonious." "Oh in closer quarters they come out!" And then, while Strether was aware of fearing closer quarters, though giving himself again to the harmonies, -- Henry James
And magnificently blue and imperturbably quiet - save for the great regular swell of -- Henry James
He said at another time that she had no heart; and he added in a moment that she had given it all away - in small pieces, like a frosted wedding-cake. -- Henry James
When it's for each other that people give things up they
don't miss them -- Henry James
Mrs. Gotch a wide berth - I couldn't talk to them. I could, -- Henry James
Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. 'My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.' 'Of course we do. That's just the fun of it!' said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: 'Don't tell me that - in this for instance - there are not abysses. I want abysses. -- Henry James
The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It -- Henry James
THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak! -- Henry James
If you haven't had your life what have you had? -- Henry James
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher. -- Henry James
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be ... -- Henry James
F I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur. -- Henry James
She has been crying here and going on - she has quite upset me. -- Henry James
We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us; -- Henry James
own devices, that he -- Henry James
Gloriani showed him, in such perfect confidence, on Chad's introduction of him, a fine worn handsome face, a face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. With -- Henry James
If this was love, love had been overrated. -- Henry James
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none. -- Henry James
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. -- Henry James
I was a screen
I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would. -- Henry James
London is on the whole the most possible form of life. -- Henry James
I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. -- Henry James
Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost. -- Henry James
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither. -- Henry James
Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost. -- Henry James
In the August night and the perspective of Beacon -- Henry James
Miss Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was interested in could have been carried on only by people she liked,and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's self
with internal convulsions,sacrifices,executions. -- Henry James
Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face. -- Henry James
And it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had discerned the promise of her dawn. -- Henry James
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy. -- Henry James
The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription. -- Henry James
One doesn't defend one's god; one's god is in himself a defense. -- Henry James
Love has nothing to do with good reasons. -- Henry James
Oh," said Catherine, with some eagerness, "it doesn't take long to like a person - when once you begin. -- Henry James
Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself. -- Henry James
There's no generosity without some sacrifice. -- Henry James
I think patriotism is like charity
it begins at home. -- Henry James
I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim. -- Henry James
I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination. -- Henry James
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy! -- Henry James
Poor Catherine's dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far. -- Henry James
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. -- Henry James
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins. -- Henry James
[Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste. -- Henry James
The chance had come - it was an extraordinary one - on the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. -- Henry James
When you are successful you naturally feel more at home -- Henry James
Intelligent, unscrupulous, determined, and capable of seeing a man strangled without changing color. -- Henry James
I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like. -- Henry James
No, no - there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see - what I don't fear! -- Henry James
From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. -- Henry James
The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The -- Henry James
She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones - the really clever ones - always understood her silliness. -- Henry James
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman. -- Henry James
What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light. -- Henry James
One should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company. -- Henry James
He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves? -- Henry James
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry. -- Henry James
It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever. -- Henry James
Quote of the day: Quote of the day: We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
[info][add][mail][note]
Henry James (1843 - 1916) -- Henry James
Yes, that's the bore of comfort," said Lord Warburton. "We only know when we're uncomfortable. -- Henry James
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all. -- Henry James
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation. -- Henry James
She is written in a foreign tongue. -- Henry James
Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation ... -- Henry James
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text, -- Henry James
diverted him from the maternal side. If he did happen just now to be at home my solicitude would of course seem officious; for in his many wanderings - I believed -- Henry James
Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the
fulness of time he got used to it. -- Henry James
I thought with joy of the morrow, -- Henry James
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them. -- Henry James
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table. -- Henry James
What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspense - it was superseded by horrible proofs. -- Henry James
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic. -- Henry James
Him - ce genie-la. Every nation has its own ideals of every -- Henry James
Fancy me between Scylla and Charybdis. -- Henry James
Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers. -- Henry James
Don't question your conscience so much
it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. -- Henry James
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it. -- Henry James
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all. -- Henry James
For all I know,he may be a prince in disguise; he rather looks like one, by the way- like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of magnanimity, and has been in a state of disgust ever since. -- Henry James
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women. -- Henry James
In American, the gentlemen obey the ladies. -- Henry James
There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay. -- Henry James
If you are going to be pushed you had better jump -- Henry James
You can do a great many things if you are rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor -- Henry James
She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. -- Henry James
Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. It really does the thing, you know. -- Henry James
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window. -- Henry James
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt. -- Henry James
I never was what I should be. -- Henry James
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are. -- Henry James
All intimacies are based on differences. -- Henry James
She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine. -- Henry James
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it. -- Henry James
It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion. -- Henry James
We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. -- Henry James
I didn't refuse often enough. -- Henry James
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher ... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius. -- Henry James
The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. -- Henry James
He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life. -- Henry James
He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in. -- Henry James
It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it. -- Henry James
We please the people we don't care for, we displease those we do! -- Henry James
Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots. -- Henry James
There is only one recipe - to care a great deal for the cookery. -- Henry James
how little he placed me and -- Henry James
A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression" - from "The Art of Fiction -- Henry James
Everything had something behind it: life was like a long corridor with rows of closed doors. -- Henry James
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup. -- Henry James
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all! -- Henry James
There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting. -- Henry James
He uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss ... -- Henry James
And she really had tones to make justice weep. -- Henry James
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry. -- Henry James
Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds. -- Henry James
Jasper to her. I was obliged -- Henry James
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. -- Henry James
And the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything. -- Henry James
Am I grave?', he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.'
'You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together. -- Henry James
There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings. -- Henry James
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. -- Henry James
One's theories, after all, matter little, it is one's humor that is the great thing. -- Henry James
I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace. -- Henry James
Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal. -- Henry James
The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who -- Henry James
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense. -- Henry James
Be one on whom nothing is lost. -- Henry James
There is no generosity without sacrifice. -- Henry James
Nothing is my last word on anything. -- Henry James
What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And -- Henry James
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination. -- Henry James
And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back. -- Henry James
They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces. -- Henry James
In art economy is always beauty. -- Henry James
Catherine had not understood all that she said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian's ease of manner and flow of ideas, -- Henry James
She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. -- Henry James
Keep making the movements of life. -- Henry James
Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? -- Henry James
Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so. -- Henry James
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions. -- Henry James
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose." said Isabel -- Henry James
He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him. -- Henry James
I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. -- Henry James
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. -- Henry James
He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. -- Henry James
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed. -- Henry James
Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one. -- Henry James
The whole of anything, is never told. -- Henry James
But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment. -- Henry James
Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity. -- Henry James
And her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world -- Henry James
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive. -- Henry James
If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you. -- Henry James
Her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make out, till the -- Henry James
I have lived too long in foreign parts -- Henry James
You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional. -- Henry James
It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke - and we'll go home as fast as we can! -- Henry James
She has only one fault; too many ideas. -- Henry James
... there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes. -- Henry James
Been changes) on the water-side, a little way beyond the spot at which -- Henry James
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma -- Henry James
[Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole. -- Henry James
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better. -- Henry James
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. -- Henry James
Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things? -- Henry James
Don't pass it by
the immediate, the real, the only, the yours. -- Henry James
Her desire to think well of herself had at least the element of humility that it always needed to be supported by proof. -- Henry James
The sense of success -the most agreeable emotion of the human heart -- Henry James
Life is a predicament which precedes death. -- Henry James
There till we reached Liverpool - I never saw him. His mother, after a little, at his request, left him alone. -- Henry James
There is no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding -- Henry James
Even iron sometimes melts. -- Henry James
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost. -- Henry James
He felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone. -- Henry James
It has not been a successful life.'
'No
it has only been a beautiful one. -- Henry James
- his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. -- Henry James
He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous, and -- Henry James
Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself. -- Henry James
Excellence does not require perfection. -- Henry James
Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine. -- Henry James
There's nothing so magnificent - for making others feel you - as to have no imagination. -- Henry James
absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some -- Henry James
Things are always different from what they might be. -- Henry James
I don't talk for your amusement. -- Henry James
Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open. -- Henry James
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly. -- Henry James
was all very interesting." She continued to look at me. "You don't think that," she then simply stated. "What have I to gain -- Henry James
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea. -- Henry James
Art is long. If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause. -- Henry James
agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was -- Henry James
I adore a moat,' said Isabel. 'Good-bye. -- Henry James
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending. -- Henry James
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. -- Henry James
No,' she sadly insisted - 'men don't know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them. -- Henry James
But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there's something rather good to be gained. -- Henry James
