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 JAMESIt 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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It’s time to start living the life you’ve imagined.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
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 -
Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
HENRY JAMES -
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
HENRY JAMES -
I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
HENRY JAMES -
When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
HENRY JAMES -
To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
HENRY JAMES -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES -
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.
HENRY JAMES -
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
HENRY JAMES