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 JAMESAnd we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
More Henry James Quotes
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Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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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 -
To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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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 -
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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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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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.’
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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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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
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In other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form
HENRY JAMES