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 JAMESDon’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.
More Henry James Quotes
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I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.
HENRY JAMES -
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
HENRY JAMES -
I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
if you are going to be pushed you had better jump
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 -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
HENRY JAMES -
All intimacies are based on differences.
HENRY JAMES -
You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you’ve lost a part.
HENRY JAMES -
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
HENRY JAMES -
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 -
Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
HENRY JAMES -
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.
HENRY JAMES