If 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.’
HENRY JAMESIt is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
More Henry James Quotes
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It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.
HENRY JAMES -
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish.
HENRY JAMES -
The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life – that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.
HENRY JAMES -
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.
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I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
HENRY JAMES -
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
HENRY JAMES -
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
HENRY JAMES -
I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
HENRY JAMES






