Top 100 Henry James Quotes
#1. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
Henry James
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.
Henry James
#7. An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue
Henry James
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
#11. 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
#12. I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
#13. 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
#14. We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.
Henry James
#15. The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.
Henry James
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.
Henry James
#19. My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
Henry James
#24. It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else.
Henry James
#25. You decline?" he cried, almost defiantly. " 'Decline' isn't the word. A man doesn't decline an insult.
Henry James
#26. Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.
Henry James
#34. I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
Henry James
#35. When Milly smiled it was a public event - when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They
Henry James
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. In the August night and the perspective of Beacon
Henry James
#39. What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.
Henry James
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.
Henry James
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.
Henry James
#47. I was a screen
I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would.
Henry James
#48. I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.
Henry James
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.
Henry James
#55. Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face.
Henry James
#56. Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
#57. 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
#58. She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
Henry James
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. [A happy ending is] a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.
Henry James
#63. 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
#64. Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.
Henry James
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one's self?
Henry James
#69. [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
#70. 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
#71. It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
#72. 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
#74. On so short an acquaintance remains shut up in his breast. His mother, I know, went to his door
Henry James
#75. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.
Henry James
#76. 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
#77. Er smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry James
#78. 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
#79. Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
Henry James
#80. ... the high brutality of good intentions ...
Henry James
#81. I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.
Henry James
#82. I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
Henry James
#83. A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.
Henry James
#84. You're a very nice girl, but I wish you'd flirt with me, and me only.
Henry James
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was
Henry James
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Don't pass it by
the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.
Henry James
#92. 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
#93. Intelligent, unscrupulous, determined, and capable of seeing a man strangled without changing color.
Henry James
#94. If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
Henry James
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. He uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss ...
Henry James
#99. 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
#100. I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.
Henry James
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