The Portrait Of A Lady Quotes

Because it is written by a nineteenth-century American, and because of its closeness to the twentieth century, The Portrait of a Lady foregoes Victorian affirmations. The price it pays, however (together with several twentieth-century novels) is that it eventually leaves the reader, along with its heroine, 'en Vair' amid its self-reflections. ~ Ian Gregor

She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had led no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life. ~ Henry James

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. ~ Henry James

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. ~ Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady is entirely successful in giving one the sense of having met somebody far too radiantly good for this world. ~ Rebecca West

Some sitters don't engage with the process of having their portrait painted at all. They'll think it's a good opportunity to catch up with all their phone calls. ~ Stuart Pearson Wright

It should be the aim of every photographer to make a single exposure that shows everything about the subject. I have been told that my portrait of Churchill is an example of this. ~ Yousuf Karsh

Here was the real scandal of On Our Backs photography: We were women shooting other women - our names, faces, and bodies on the line - and we all brought our sexual agenda to the lens. Each pictorial was a memoir. That is quite the opposite of a fashion shoot at Vogue or Playboy, where the talent is a prop ...
When we began our magazine, female fashion and portrait models - all of them - were shot the same way kittens and puppies are photographed for holiday calendars: in fetching poses, with no intentions of their own. ~ Susie Bright

Many of Bonnard's later paintings are shot through with a powerful sense of morbidity. The self-portraits he painted after catching sight of himself in the various mirrors in the house - the mirror in the bathroom or the mirror in his bedroom, still lit from above by a single accusatory light bulb - are almost appallingly raw. ~ Andrew Graham-Dixon

Ronan wasn't exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan's rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey's hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls ... They seem to us to be very simple ... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days ... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait ... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch. ~ Isak Dinesen

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors. ~ John L. Casti

Today, take a moment to celebrate you. Your beauty. Your style. Your sense of inner mischief. The way you glow in the sunlight. Your strut in those badass boots. The way the dress hugs your soft curves. The gleam in your eye. The curve of your irrepressible smile. The line of your collarbone. The way you know, underneath all the doubts and insecurities and demons that you are, in fact, magic. And what's more? You always have been. You don't need someone else to say so. This isn't for likes or comments. You don't need to book a photoshoot for this celebration. This is between you and you. For you to take the time to see yourself. To smile at your own beauty. Find a spot where you feel the energy. Where the sun hits just so. Where the colors or textures make you feel more alive, more you. Find somewhere to prop your phone and set the timer on your camera. You don't need special equipment. And then just see what happens. Be open and curious about what wants to be seen. If someone sees you and stares or laughs or has the nerve to judge, you just ground down and rise up even more. They are just missing out on how good it can feel to see and know your own magic and beauty. And yes. If you want, and it feels good, you should share it. Because we want to see you and celebrate you too. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

As he went about to the other workrooms he realised that every painting was a self-portrait even when it was a still life or a scene over the roofs of Paris; for no man ever pictured anything but himself, his core, the things that he was basically. With every brush stroke the artist was mercilessly exposed: he could not conceal nothing, he could pretend to be another person, to believe in other values, but in the end he would fool no one. ~ Irving Stone

This is not for me a memory. It is a portrait of now. Of a state of being of the world.' He slowly bowed his head. 'And of freedom, for change. It portends coming change. Crushing of enemies, perhaps; a coming winter, most like. But as you will never brew exactly this brew again, so the world will never again know this time or, alas, this peace. ~ Michael A. Stackpole

He moved farther into the room and sat on a pink ruffled stool. Alex couldn't help but chuckle at the picture he made. Looking down at his seat, he joined her in laughter, saying, "Not exactly the portrait of lordliness?" She covered her smile and shook her head. "Not exactly." He ~ Sarah MacLean

I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world. ~ Samuel Johnson

table sat an antique ormolu clock, its hands frozen on the twelve and the ten, 11:50. The magic hour. The time when Zee's ghosts appeared in the greenhouse wall. Bits and pieces of two scenarios were coming back to her, fitting together like a child's jigsaw puzzle. She had, indeed, come to this place - Mathew Brady's New York studio - a short time earlier to have her portrait made ~ Becky Lee Weyrich

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic. ~ Tom Shales

Merry Christmas," said George. "Don't go downstairs for a bit."
"Why not?" said Ron.
"Mum's crying again," said Fred heavily. "Percy sent back his Christmas jumper." [I guess that's a sweater, though my jury is still out on it until I get a future confirmation.]
"Without a not," added George. "Hasn't asked how Dad is or visit him [in the hospital] or anything ... "
"We tried to comfort her," said Fred, moving around the bed to look at Harry's portrait. "Told her Percy's nothing but a humongous pile of rat droppings
"
"
didn't work," said George, helping himself to a Chocolate Frog. "So Lupin took over. Best let him cheer her up before we go down for breakfast, I reckon. ~ J.K. Rowling

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models ... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know ... ~ Francis Bacon

There was a picture of the family over the mantelpiece, removed thither from the front room after Mrs. Osborne's death - George was on a pony, the elder sister holding him up a bunch of flowers; the younger led by her mother's hand; all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten - the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Over the fireplace was the portrait of his father's first wife, Robert's mother, Olive. Jay hated that painting. There she was, solemn and saintly, looking down her long nose at all who came after her. When she caught a fever and died suddenly at the age of twenty-nine his father had remarried, but he never forgot his first love. He treated Jay's mother, Alicia, like a mistress, a plaything with no status and no rights; and he made Jay feel almost like an illegitimate son. Robert was the firstborn, the heir, the special one. Jay sometimes wanted to ask whether it had been an immaculate conception and a virgin birth. ~ Ken Follett

Culture! Yes - if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of - well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ... God! If I could emigrate ... ~ Edith Wharton

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across. ~ Damien Chazelle

She looked at him, her eyes brimming with laughter again. Joel sat gazing at her, wondering how much attention she was drawing from the other occupants of the room. But, however much it was, she seemed unaware of it. He gazed back at her, more than a bit shaken, for she looked like a different woman when she laughed. She looked young and vivid and ...

What was the word his mind was searching for? Gorgeous? She was hardly that.

Stunning.

That was it. She looked stunning, and he was feeling a bit stunned. She made prettiness seem bland.

Her laughter quickly died, however. "You must have gathered enough information about me to paint a dozen pictures," she said, sounding suddenly cross. "I wish you would paint that infernal portrait and be done with it."

"So that you can be rid of me?" he said. "Alas, you would not be that even if I were ready to paint you tonight. We would still be sharing the schoolroom two afternoons each week. But I am not ready. The more I learn of you, the more I realize I do not know you at all. And, by your own admission, you do not know yourself either. ~ Mary Balogh

That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing. ~ Nikolai Gogol

When I make a portrait,I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street. ~ Medardo Rosso

When confronted by a 'believer' it is easy for me to contrast the views of the skeptic with those of the rationalist. I simply reach into my pocket and pull out my change.

Holding a quarter aloft, I say, 'This is a most remarkable coin, for it is heavier than all the sins of humanity committed since the beginning of the human race.'

I then hold up a nickel and say, 'This coin is even more amazing, as it is brighter and shinier than the flames that proceeded from the Burning Bush discovered on Mt. Sinai by Moses.'

Then I raise a penny and state, 'This portrait of President Lincoln is more realistic and true-to-life than any portrait of Satan ever painted.'

And finally, I hold out a bright, shiny dime and say, 'And this dime is the most amazing of all because it is heavier and contains more precious metals than all the gold bricks in the streets of Heaven.'

I end with 'Give to Caesar what is his, and hold the rest of it dear - for it is all you see and touch - and the Christian god can take care of all his things, for they amount to less than this 41 cents I hold here in my hand. ~ E. Haldeman-Julius

One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the type-writer, trying to get back to the book he'd come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he'd needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William's courage, for example. And here was William's sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov's (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the light off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuc ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Before, the myth of photography doesn't lie was used in order to cover up tricks. If I [make a] portrait [of] you, accommodate you, illuminate you, put make up on you or use a filter, am I not manipulating reality? The only difference is that now I can do it from the computer in the postclick instead of the preclick. If I decide to photograph something instead of something else, I also manipulate reality. Of course a photograph can lie or commit abuse, but it always could. ~ Pedro Meyer

A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this; about in its way. About the extent to which we're able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It's a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naivete. ~ Lisa Halliday

No artist has painted
A true portrait of Lenin
Ages to come will complete
Lenin's unfinished portrait.
Did Poletaev understand the tragic implication of his lines about Lenin? (pg179) ~ Vasily Grossman

I sat back and looked at it. It was ugly, dark, uncontrolled. Like a monster's face. Or maybe what I saw there was my own face. I couldn't quite tell. Was the face the image of something evil or the image of myself?
"Both," Bea muttered, as if I'd spoken my question out loud. "Of course, it's both. But it shouldn't be. Goodness, no. ~ Jennifer Brown

The missing girl - there had been unceasing news reports, always flashing to that achingly ordinary school portrait of the vanished teen, you know the one, with the rainbow-swirl background, the girl's hair too straight, her smile too self-conscious, then a quick cut to the worried parents on the front lawn, microphones surrounding them, Mom silently tearful, Dad reading a statement with quivering lip - that girl, that missing girl had just walked past Edna Skylar. ~ Harlan Coben

One chilly autumn evening, he was reminded of the painter by a stalk of corn: the way it stood there armed in its rough coat of leaves, exposing its delicate roots atop the mounded earth like so many nerves, it was also a portrait of his own most vulnerable self. The discovery only served to increase his melancholy. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

But gradually, as he tried to inhabit the room presented on the canvas (Van Gogh - The Bedroom), he began to experience it as a prison, an impossible space, an image, not so much of a place to live, but of the mind that has been forced to live there. Observe carefully. The bed blocks one door, a chair blocks the other door, the shutters are closed: you can't get in, and once you are in, you can't get out. Stifled among the furniture and everyday objects of the room, you begin to hear a cry of suffering in this painting, and once you hear it, it does not stop. 'I cried by reason of mine affliction...' But there is no answer to this cry. The man in this painting (and this is a self-portrait, no different from a picture of a man's face, with eyes, nose, lips, and jaw) has been alone too much, has struggled too much in the depthts of solitude. The world ends at that barricaded door. For the room is not a representation of solitude, it is the substance of solitude itself. And it is a thing so heavy, so unbreatheable, that it cannot be shown in any terms other than what it is. ~ Paul Auster

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still. ~ Alfred Stieglitz

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love ... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

Someone made me a Leaf Coneybear finger puppet. Someone made me a portrait of me on some chocolate. I'm keeping it. I daren't eat such a work of art. It's so unique and so fun that fans do that. It's incredibly flattering. I like it when people spend time on me. People don't spend the same amount of time on my brother who's an insurance broker. ~ Barrett Foa

The subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were striking; but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived. ~ Emily Bronte