Top 100 James Henry Quotes
#1. Central depth of purple, Leaves more bright than rose, Who shall tell what brightest thought Out of darkness grows? Who, through what funereal pain, Souls to love and peace attain? - Leigh Hunt (James Henry Leigh Hunt
Leigh Hunt
#2. I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did.
Cynthia Ozick
#3. It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
Henry James
#4. In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.
James Henry Breasted
#5. But the blots, Turkey," intimated I. "True,-but, with submission, sir, behold these hairs! I am getting old. Surely, sir, a blot or two of a warm afternoon is not to be severely urged against gray hairs. Old age-even if it blot the page-is honorable. With submission, sir, we both are getting old.
Henry James
#6. I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.
Henry James
#8. Life is a predicament which precedes death.
Henry James
#9. 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
#10. Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.
Henry James
#11. When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.
Henry James
#12. Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
#13. The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Henry James
#14. It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.
James Henry Breasted
#15. If you haven't had your life what have you had?
Henry James
#16. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life.
Henry James
#17. 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
#18. We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;
Henry James
#19. 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
#20. I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.
Henry James
#21. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.
Henry James
#22. 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.
Henry James
#24. 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.
Henry James
#25. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.
Henry James
#26. There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
Henry James
#28. The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.
Philip Guedalla
#29. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children - ?" "We
Henry James
#30. Make up to a good one and marry here, and your life will become much more interesting.
Henry James
#31. 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.
Henry James
#32. Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
#33. All the horrors of war are soon forgotten in the pomp and circumstance of show and parade.
James Henry Gooding
#34. Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination.
Henry James
#35. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#36. But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James Henry Breasted
#37. 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
#38. There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
#39. 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
#40. It isn't a question of any beauty,' said Maggie; 'it's only a question of the quantity of truth.' 'Oh the quantity of truth!' the Prince richly though ambiguously murmured.
Henry James
#41. Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#42. It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Henry James
#43. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother's name, and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James - someone more talented than I: someone brilliant without even trying.
Mona Simpson
#44. 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
#45. Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.
Henry James
#46. I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.
Sarah Waters
#47. Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.
Henry James
#48. My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.
Hamish Bowles
#49. Sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.
Henry James
#50. I think patriotism is like charity
it begins at home.
Henry James
#51. Her sublimity. And that belief had remained with her, I make out, till the
Henry James
#52. 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
#53. She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
#54. It's time to start living the life you've imagined.
Henry James
#55. I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James
#56. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.
Henry James
#57. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#58. Peter Kemp observed that 'Literature owes an enormous debt to Henry James's bowels.' As the correspondence revealed, the young Henry suffered from chronic constipation. To alleviate it his parents dispatched him on a grand tour of Europe (doubtless hoping the foreign food would loosen his entrails).
Anonymous
#60. 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
#61. Mrs. Gotch a wide berth - I couldn't talk to them. I could,
Henry James
#62. Since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.
Henry James
#63. A family is a little world within doors; the miniature resemblance of the great worls without
Henry James
#64. If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic.
Chris Bohjalian
#65. The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.
Henry James
#66. 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
#67. Front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in
Henry James
#68. The ladies of St. James's! They're painted to the eyes; Their white is stays for ever, Their red it never dies; But Phyllida, my Phillida! Her colour comes and goes; It trembles to a lily,
It wavers to a rose.
Henry Austin Dobson
#69. 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
#70. Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.
Henry James
#71. The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
#72. 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
#73. I don't think people believe that any more, I don't think people think that it really matters whether you appreciate Henry James more than Theodore Dreiser.
Louis Menand
#74. Some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.
Henry James
#75. 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
#77. An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue
Henry James
#78. This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.
James Henry Breasted
#79. 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
#80. Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
Henry James
#81. 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
#82. Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.
Henry James
#83. Things are always different than what they might be ... If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James
#84. 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.
Henry James
#85. I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
#86. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspense - it was superseded by horrible proofs.
Henry James
#87. 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
#88. A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.
Mary Norris
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. I think then I may safely conclude and I firmly believe that American slavery is not only not a sin but especially commanded by God through Moses and approved by Christ through His Apostles.
James Henry Hammond
#92. The most superficial student of Roman history must be struck by the extraordinary degree in which the fortunes of the republic were affected by the presence of foreigners, under different names, on her soil.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#93. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.
Henry James
#94. She had driven in by a single word a little golden nail, the sharp intention of which he signally felt. He
Henry James
#95. Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
Henry James
#96. The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The
Henry James
#97. 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
#98. 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.
Henry James
#100. Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
Henry James
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