Things are always different from what they might be.
HENRY JAMESHis beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
More Henry James Quotes
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I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
HENRY JAMES -
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort.
HENRY JAMES -
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
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 -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
…he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
HENRY JAMES -
Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
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 -
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 -
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession.
HENRY JAMES -
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
HENRY JAMES -
To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.
HENRY JAMES -
An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.
HENRY JAMES -
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
HENRY JAMES -
We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES -
When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.
HENRY JAMES -
She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
HENRY JAMES -
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have.
HENRY JAMES -
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
HENRY JAMES -
Excellence does not require perfection.
HENRY JAMES -
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
All intimacies are based on differences.
HENRY JAMES -
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.
HENRY JAMES