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 JAMESIf I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience and experience only,’ I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’
More Henry James Quotes
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You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
HENRY JAMES -
Deep experience is never peaceful.
HENRY JAMES -
We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.
HENRY JAMES -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
HENRY JAMES -
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
HENRY JAMES -
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day.
HENRY JAMES -
And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
HENRY JAMES -
All intimacies are based on differences.
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
HENRY JAMES -
Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
HENRY JAMES -
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES






