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Top Henry James Quotes

Browse top 260 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Henry James.

Favorite Henry James Quotes

1. "agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was" ~ Henry James
2. "...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything." ~ Henry James
3. "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
4. "You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part." ~ Henry James
5. "do you think it isbetter to be clever than to be good?""Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good fornothing unless you are clever." ~ Henry James
6. "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
7. "You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left." ~ Henry James
8. "She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!" ~ Henry James
9. "... was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a rigorous jerk." ~ Henry James
10. "Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face." ~ Henry James
11. "...and with this reminder other things came to her -- how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinantly valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price." ~ Henry James
12. "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
13. "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
14. "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
15. "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
16. "He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts." ~ Henry James
17. "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
18. "The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form." ~ Henry James
19. "...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses." ~ Henry James
20. "Her memory's your love. You want no other." ~ Henry James
21. "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
22. "I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin." ~ Henry James
23. "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
24. "Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly here be things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to rest." ~ Henry James
25. "One doesn't defend one's god; one's god is in himself a defense." ~ Henry James
26. "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
27. "It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion." ~ Henry James
28. "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
29. "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
30. "The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts—what might she call them?—of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden—allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood." ~ Henry James
31. "It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.""For sheer terror?" I remember asking.He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful — dreadfulness!""Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women." ~ Henry James
32. "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..." ~ Henry James
33. "[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
34. "However, Nick acted as much as possible under the circumstances, and that was rectifying — it brought with it enjoyment and a working faith. He had not gone counter to the axiom that in a case of doubt one was to hold off; for that applied to choice, and he had not at present the slightest pretension to choosing. He knew he was lifted along, that what he was doing was not first-rate, that nothing was settled by it and that if there was essentially a problem in his life it would only grow tougher with keeping. But if doing one's sum to-morrow instead of to-day does not make the sum easier it at least makes to-day so." ~ Henry James
35. "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
36. "She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering." ~ Henry James
37. "- Do you know I love you ?- I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not !" ~ Henry James
38. "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
39. "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" ~ Henry James
40. "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
41. "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
42. "...some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile." ~ Henry James
43. "Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet." ~ Henry James
44. "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
45. "It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition." ~ Henry James
46. "A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals." ~ Henry James
47. "Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines." ~ Henry James
48. "It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep." ~ Henry James
49. "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
50. "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
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Can't is the cancer of happen"
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What Did Henry James Talk About?

Thin
She
Wit
Here
Per
Self
Ear
Ten
Con
Hen
Lit
Bee
End
Use
Act
Ally
King
Able
Hey
Light
Old
Air
Tan
Pen
Thou
Sin
Son
Less
Mad
Lie
Low
Win
Seem
Era
Sit
Ours
Los
Side
Rate
Cat
Rang
Read
Rest
Once
Himself
Does
Said
Sing
Though
Hum

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