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 JAMESIn other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form
More Henry James Quotes
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Things are always different from what they might be.
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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.
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
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Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
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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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Life is a predicament which precedes death.
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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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Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
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One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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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.
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Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
HENRY JAMES