The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
HENRY JAMESWe 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
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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.
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She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
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One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
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It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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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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Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
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She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
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His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
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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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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.
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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
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True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
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Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
HENRY JAMES -
In art economy is always beauty.
HENRY JAMES