Henry James Quotes

You can do a great many things if you're rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you'll take a companion - some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet. ~ Henry James

He had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days. ~ Henry James

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

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence - especially if it occurs toward the end - or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don't mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that's all. ~ Truman Capote

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

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. ~ 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

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

but she carries her head like a pretty woman." (Chapter 1) ~ Henry James

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. ~ Henry James

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did. ~ 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

Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence. ~ Leon Edel

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky ...
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ 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

[Henry James'] essay's closing lines can either be read neutrally or as a more purposeful wish that this mystery [of Shakespeare's authorship] will one day be resolved by the 'criticism of the future': 'The figured tapestry, the long arras that hides him, is always there ... May it not then be but a question, for the fullness of time, of the finer weapon, the sharper point, the stronger arm, the more extended lunge?' Is Shakespeare hinting here that one day critics will hit upon another, more suitable candidate, identify the individual in whom the man and artist converge and are 'one'? If so, his choice of metaphor - recalling Hamlet's lunge at the arras in the closet scene - is fortunate. Could James have forgotten that the sharp point of Hamlet's weapon finds the wrong man? ~ James Shapiro

[ ... ] under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose - pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. ~ 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

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

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

Heaven preserve us! what a hotch-potch!" cried Hubert. "Is that what they are doing nowadays? I very seldom read a novel, but when I glance into one, I'm sure to find some such stuff as that! Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination. Common life - I don't say it's a vision of bliss, but it's better than that! Their stories are like the underside of a carpet, - nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue - a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. 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. Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a very pretty fellow. Why didn't he marry her first and convert her afterwards? Isn't a clergyman after all, before all, a man? I ~ 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

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. ~ Raymond Carver

People are free to find out the best and the worst of me! ~ Henry James

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. ~ Henry James

In art economy is always beauty. ~ Henry James

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly. ~ Henry James

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that ~ Virginia Woolf

He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course
him too a modest retreat awaited. ~ Henry James

She was afraid,' said Mrs. Bread, very confidently; 'she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. That was the real trouble, sir. She was like a fair peach, I may say, with just one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature. ~ Henry James

... there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes. ~ Henry James

THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak! ~ Henry James

This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it - doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. ~ Henry James

Henry James rhymed Fellowship with the gesture of biting a neglected apple, and Ovid a scarlet curtain with the skin of Atalanta. ~ Hugh Kenner

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. ~ Henry James

You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses - remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can.

Sorrow comes in great waves - no one can know that better than you - but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.

My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don't think, don't feel, any more than you can help, don't conclude or decide - don't do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt ~ 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

One can believe James's claim to an "imagination of disaster"; so many of his protagonists are unhappy in the end, and yet he gives them an aura of victory. It is because these characters depend on such high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. ~ Azar Nafisi

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

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, "Ah me! I wish I were a widow!" Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather's weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition. ~ Henry James

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do. ~ Henry James

Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique dazzling gift. The gift of James Joyce, and not the talent of Henry James. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

After this Daisy was never at home, and Winterbourne ceased to meet her at the houses of their common acquaintances, because, as he perceived, these shrewd people had quite made up their minds that she was going too far. They ceased to invite her, and they intimated that they desired to express observant Europeans the great truth that, though Miss Daisy Miller was a young American lady, her behaviour was not representative - was regarded by her compatriots as abnormal. Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned towards her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all. He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon her ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant and irresponsible little organism a defiant, passionate, perfectly observant consciousness of the impression she produced. He asked himself whether Daisy's defiance came from the consciousness of innocence or from her being, essentially, a young person of the reckless class. It must be admitted that holding oneself to a belief in Daisy's "innocence" came to see Winterbourne more and more a matter of fine-spun gallantry. As I have already had occasion to relate, he was angry at finding himself reduced to chopping logic about this young lady; he was vexed at his want of instinctive certitude as to how far her ec ~ Henry James

But I was to be later on so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill. ~ Henry James

It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've been
shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard - the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices - as much as I can. But
when I've to come out and into a strong light - then, my dear, I'm a horror! ~ Henry James

The more you know the more unhappy you are ~ Henry James

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perception. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item – to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He would n't for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act – frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected – of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. ~ Henry James

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I never was what I should be. ~ 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

My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter. ~ Henry James

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. ~ 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

We basically ran the Henry Bellmon campaign. ~ James Lankford

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

It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home; and that Mrs Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. ~ Henry James

A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self;" (Chapter 12) ~ 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

It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature. ~ Henry James

[Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise. ~ Edmund Morris

It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight choice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either. ~ Angela Carter

She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. ~ 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

She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet - since it was all for tenderness - she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man - that she loves you with passion. ~ Henry James

I didn't refuse often enough. ~ Henry James

The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one. ~ Henry James Sumner Maine

how little he placed me and ~ Henry James

It was as if these depths, constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare express, uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. ~ Henry James

Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world. ~ David Morrell

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

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.
("Sir Edmund Orme") ~ 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

The privilege isn't given to everyone. ... You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. - Henry James, 1881 ~ Hampton Sides

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. ~ Wallace Stegner

Great statesmen oughtn't to waltz. ~ 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

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 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. ~ Henry James

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

One doesn't defend one's god; one's god is in himself a defense. ~ Henry James

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

Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation ... ~ Henry James

embodied in the remark that dear far-away Ruth's intentions were doubtless good. She and Kent are even yet looking for another prop, but no one presents a true sphere of usefulness. They complain that people are self-sufficing. With Saltram the fine type of the child of adoption was scattered, the grander, the elder style. They've got their carriage back, but what's an empty carriage? In short I think we were all happier as well as poorer before; even including George Gravener, who by the deaths of his brother and his nephew has lately become Lord Maddock. His wife, whose fortune clears the property, is criminally dull; he hates being in the Upper ~ Henry James

I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like. ~ Henry James

Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard. ~ H.L. Mencken

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself. ~ 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

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box. ~ 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

Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital? ~ Henry James

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

It has not been a successful life.'
'No
it has only been a beautiful one. ~ Henry James

The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one's will and one's inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one's organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig. ~ Henry James

It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else. ~ Henry James

I was a screen
I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would. ~ Henry James

[Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole. ~ Henry James

Sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. ~ Henry James

Fancy me between Scylla and Charybdis. ~ 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

The day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees. ~ Henry James