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 JAMESIn art economy is always beauty.
More Henry James Quotes
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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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To believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
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To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
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She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
HENRY JAMES -
I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
HENRY JAMES -
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
HENRY JAMES -
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.
HENRY JAMES -
…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
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.
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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.
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We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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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 -
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
HENRY JAMES