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 JAMESTo believe in a child is to believe in the Future.
More Henry James Quotes
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Don’t pass it by – the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for.
HENRY JAMES -
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.
HENRY JAMES -
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 JAMES -
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
HENRY JAMES -
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
HENRY JAMES -
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish.
HENRY JAMES -
You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
HENRY JAMES -
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
HENRY JAMES -
Things are always different from what they might be.
HENRY JAMES -
Make the short story tremendously succinct – with a very short pulse or rhythm – and the closest selection of detail.
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.
HENRY JAMES -
I’m yours for ever–for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
HENRY JAMES -
I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.
HENRY JAMES -
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
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