It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
HENRY JAMESCriticism 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.
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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.
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish.
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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 -
Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
HENRY JAMES -
Imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
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And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
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Things are always different from what they might be.
HENRY JAMES