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 JAMESDon’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.
More Henry James Quotes
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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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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.
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We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.
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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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When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
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His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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To establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one’s own.
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Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
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To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
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It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.
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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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There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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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.
HENRY JAMES