Henry James Quotes

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.

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.

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.

There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering.

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.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue

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.

You can do a great many things if you are rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor

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.

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.

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.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there
and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it
very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

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.

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?

It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.

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.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives
I may say it
have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous ... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little "air penche

She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures ...

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.

Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.

Excellence does not require perfection.

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,

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.

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

[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.

And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.

This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money
it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful
this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity.

They stood together a moment; both her hands were in both of his. 'You've been my best friend,' she said.

'It was for you that I wanted - that I wanted to live. But I'm of no use to you.'

Then it came over her more poignantly that she should not see him again. She could not accept that; she could not part with him that way. 'If you should send for me I'd come,' she said at last.

'Your husband won't consent to that.'

'Oh yes, I can arrange it.'

'I shall keep that for my last pleasure!' said Ralph.

In answer to which she simply kissed him.

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!

What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And

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.

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.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommon easy." "Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with inconsequence. I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a want of consideration on the young man's part, arising perhaps from selfishness. His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to struggle alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too heavily. He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people. Tall and strong,

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. "It isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so."

Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I point that out."

She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. "I can't indeed resist you."

Then there we are!" said Strether.

She looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered melancholy comrades
some of them so melancholy as to be down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible in short, that one would live if one could.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

- Do you know I love you ?
- I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not !

The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be – it can't be helped – in a chronic state of rabies.

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.

He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.

The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried herself with a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and agitations of the world.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

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.

I am not afraid," she said; which seemed quite presumptuous enough.
"You are not afraid of suffering?"
"Yes, I am afraid of suffering. But I am not afraid of ghosts. And I think people suffer too easily," she added.
"I don't believe you do," said Ralph, looking at her with his hands in his pockets.
"I don't think that's a fault," she answered. "It is not absolutely necessary to suffer; we were not made for that."
"You were not, certainly."
"I am not speaking of myself." And she turned away a little.
"No, it isn't a fault," said her cousin. "It's a merit to be strong."
"Only, if you don't suffer, they call you hard," Isabel remarked. They passed out of the smaller drawing-room, into which they had returned from the gallery, and paused in the hall, at the foot of the staircase. Here Ralph presented his companion with her bed-room candle, which he had taken from a niche. "Never mind what they call you," he said. "When you do suffer, they call you an idiot. The great point is to be as happy as possible.

What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?

Must excuse him - he should have to go back to the club. He would return in half an hour - or in less. He walked

I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy
not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.

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.

She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte's view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.

Its clear friendliness seemed to ring out audibly amid this appalling hush of the harmonies of life. "I wish you might know a day's friendliness or a day's freedom, yours without question, without condition, and till death." Here was the voice of nature, of appointed protection; the sound of it aroused her early sense of native nearness to her cousin; had he been at hand she would have sought a wholesome refuge in his arms. She sat down at her writing-table, with her brow in her hands, light-headed with her passionate purpose, steadying herself to think. A day's freedom had come at last; a lifetime's freedom confronted her. For,

The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements - an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.

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.

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.

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.

agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was

Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance - he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, THE man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke - that was his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted. So she had seen it while he didn't, and so she served at this hour to drive the truth home. It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion. This the companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then offered him the chance to baffle his doom. One's doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him. The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived - who could say now with what passion? - since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.

He escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable.

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

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.

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.

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.

I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.

I want to bring them down, - down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them - I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.

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.

There is only one recipe - to care a great deal for the cookery.

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.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know -

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.

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.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.

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.

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.

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.

Her real offense was having a mind of her own.

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.

He fairly glittered in the gloom.

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.

Some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.

Definite settlement of the question. From the deck, where I merely turned round and looked, I saw the light of another summer

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 ...

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass.

But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.