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 JAMESThe 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.
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.
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One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
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Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose.
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Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
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if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
HENRY JAMES -
If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
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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 -
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
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Love has nothing to do with good reasons.
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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 -
Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES