Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
HENRY JAMESHowever British you may be, I am more British still.
More Henry James Quotes
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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
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 -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES -
It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
HENRY JAMES -
There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
HENRY JAMES -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
HENRY JAMES -
If this was love, love had been overrated.
HENRY JAMES -
It 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.
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 -
To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
HENRY JAMES -
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
HENRY JAMES -
God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
HENRY JAMES -
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
HENRY JAMES -
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
HENRY JAMES






