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 JAMESYou were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
More Henry James Quotes
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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 -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES -
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
HENRY JAMES -
Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity.
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.
HENRY JAMES -
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES -
Life is a predicament which precedes death.
HENRY JAMES -
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES