The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .
HENRY JAMESI 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.
More Henry James Quotes
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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 -
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
HENRY JAMES -
Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
HENRY JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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If this was love, love had been overrated.
HENRY JAMES -
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES -
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
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 -
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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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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And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
HENRY JAMES -
I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.
HENRY JAMES -
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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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.
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Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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.
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I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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.
HENRY JAMES