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 JAMESThings are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
More Henry James Quotes
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Life is a predicament which precedes death.
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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 -
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 JAMES -
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
HENRY JAMES -
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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I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.
HENRY JAMES -
Sorrow comes in great waves…but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us.
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 -
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
HENRY JAMES -
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
HENRY JAMES -
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
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I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES -
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
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And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
HENRY JAMES -
…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
HENRY JAMES