Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry James Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Henry James.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1671409

The main object of the novel is to represent life ... 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

Henry James Quotes 355693

Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 264055

Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives
I may say it
have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous ... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little "air penche — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1176033

It's very silly," she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 582610

I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 608916

To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2232014

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1764272

But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there's something rather good to be gained. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1167811

I'm not in my first youth - I can do what I choose - I belong quite to the independent class. I've neither father nor mother; I'm poor and of a serious disposition; I'm not pretty. I therefore am not bound to be timid and conventional; indeed I can't afford such luxuries. Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don't wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1714330

My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe."
Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1448400

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense? — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1738693

He would return in half an hour - or in less. He walked away and I sat there alone, conscious, on the dark dismantled simplified scene, in the deep silence that rests on American towns during the hot season - there was now and then a far cry or a plash in the water, and at intervals the tinkle of the bells of the horse-cars on the long bridge, slow in the suffocating night - of the strange influence, half-sweet, half-sad, that abides in houses uninhabited or about to become so, in places muffled and bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem (like the disconcerted dogs, to whom everything is alike sinister) to recognise the eve of a journey. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 519511

doubtless not singular that the ladies from Merrimac Avenue — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 384462

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications ... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1394999

[ ... ] under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose - pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1922557

I don't talk for your amusement. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 274658

That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 849555

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1817796

It's out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It's never wrong to do that." She — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1517273

Poor Catherine's dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1873028

You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1758420

On 10 August 1914, five days after war was declared, Henry James, in a letter to a friend, expressed his revulsion at the prospect of war, and articulated the illusion that had preceded it:

'Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I'm sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our beliefs that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1736113

Catherine had not understood all that she said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian's ease of manner and flow of ideas, — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1450037

Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1669015

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1654177

If Quint - on your remonstrance at the time you speak of - was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1641582

Yes, that's the bore of comfort," said Lord Warburton. "We only know when we're uncomfortable. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1469111

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1628593

Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1513600

But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1608550

The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1598899

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1520839

Why it would be a pleasure," I replied rather foolishly. "Do you mean for you?" "Well, yes - call — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2009040

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2252436

Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2236993

In art economy is always beauty. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2201593

He sat with his yes fixed on hers while she spoke; then he lowered them and attached them to a spot on the carpet as if he were making a strong effort to say nothing but what he ought. He was a strong man in the wrong, and he was acute enough to see that an uncompromising exhibition of his strength would only throw the falsity of his position into relief. Isabel was not incapable of taking any advantage of position over a person of this quality, and though little desirous to flaunt it in his face she could enjoy being able to say 'You know you oughtn't to have written to me yourself!' and to say it with an air of triumph. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2198165

[Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2180551

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost! — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2101572

Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2094239

Been changes) on the water-side, a little way beyond the spot at which — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2028238

He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2027103

I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2024569

It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke - and we'll go home as fast as we can! — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2015638

It seemed to him that he both knew too much to imagine [the child's] simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1826327

When you have lived as long as I, you will see that every human being has his shell, and that you must take the shell into acount. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we are each of us made up of a cluster of apurtenances. What do you call one's self? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everythng tht belongs to us - and then flows back again. ( ... ) One's self - for other people - is one's expression of one's self; and one's house, one's clothes, the books one reads, the company one keeps - these things are all expressive. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 2000589

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there
and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it
very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1991091

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1990967

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1979232

I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.
("Sir Edmund Orme") — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1957774

And it was in the mitigated midnight of these approximations that she had discerned the promise of her dawn. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1952753

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1253131

Her memory's your love. You want no other. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1857475

She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1849640

She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1844300

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 536518

There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 704164

Though I couldn't make out what she was talking of I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one's imagination.
("Sir Edmund Orme") — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 687110

Our relation, all round, exists
it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 626889

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 612830

I didn't refuse often enough. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 610366

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky ...
("Sir Edmund Orme") — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 609111

It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've been
shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard - the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices - as much as I can. But
when I've to come out and into a strong light - then, my dear, I'm a horror! — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 600698

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 583982

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 581698

Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 565302

Miss Chancellor would have been much happier if the movements she was interested in could have been carried on only by people she liked,and if revolutions, somehow, didn't always have to begin with one's self
with internal convulsions,sacrifices,executions. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 715029

Advertising scientifically worked presented itself thus as the great new force. It really does the thing, you know. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 511453

In American, the gentlemen obey the ladies. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 464903

He felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 419299

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; 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

Henry James Quotes 409433

But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know - — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 406563

He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 360886

I don't see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don't want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 215396

She [was] ... one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining
minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued clusters of confessionals at St. Peters. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 197980

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 184531

... the high brutality of good intentions ... — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 124317

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

Henry James Quotes 1014820

It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1392937

Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1333216

You can do a great many things if you are rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1311072

When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 121166

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1245536

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures
a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1218889

I'm glad you like adverbs - I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1203670

Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1175169

In the August night and the perspective of Beacon — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1167142

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1139564

Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible! — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1438838

It was as if these depths, constantly bridged over by a structure that was firm enough in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had, all the while, not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an idea within her that she didn't dare express, uttered just before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 1011240

She had never yet encountered a personage so exotic, and she always felt more at ease in the presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was inqiuitous. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 984315

If you haven't had your life what have you had? — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 972422

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 939968

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions ... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother ... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 908492

Sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company - that at the eleventh — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 818663

It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 816068

When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run, we say; it will meanwhile cost you an occasional pang to see your cherished theory turned into a football by the critics. A football is not, as such, a very respectable object, and the more numerous the players, the more ridiculous it becomes. Unless, therefore, you are very confident of your ability to rescue it from the chaos of kicks, you will best consult its interests by not mingling in the game. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 786932

Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 741937

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. — Henry James

Henry James Quotes 724312

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life. — Henry James