James Henry Quotes & Sayings

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

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President. — Henry James

I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're a knowledgeable family. — James Goldman

You're a very nice girl, but I wish you'd flirt with me, and me only. — Henry James

He's wearing a dog tag. His name is Henry Webb. His unit is called BLM." "What does it mean?" "Black Like Me. A solidarity movement, I suppose. — James Patterson

Life's too short for chess. — Henry James Byron

Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the
fulness of time he got used to it. — Henry James

They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well. — Henry James

Be one on whom nothing is lost. — Henry James

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. — Henry James

Well, I am rather afraid of that visit," said Clifford. "It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again."
The Baroness looked at him a moment.
"My dear child," she said, "there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman
probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis. — Henry James

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. — Henry James

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew. — Henry James

Henry James was our master of periphrasis
the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words. — Edward Abbey

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

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things. — Henry James

When you forget to eat, you know you're alive. — Henry James

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. — Raymond Carver

I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world. — Henry James

Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days (from the social point of view) about 1820. After this, the tide of fashion began to set steadily northward, as, indeed, in New York, thanks to the narrow channel in which it flows, it is obliged to do, and the great hum of traffic rolled farther to the right and left of Broadway. — Henry James

One's theories, after all, matter little, it is one's humor that is the great thing. — Henry James

Life's to short for chess. — Henry James Byron

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination. — Susan Sontag

I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy. — Emma Tennant

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age. — James Thurber

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things. — Henry James

Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots. — Henry James

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do. — Henry James

Was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk. — Henry James

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of. — Henry James

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. — 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, 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. — Henry James

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of. — Henry James

So much of James Bond was Ian Fleming himself. Ian was never able to write about anything he did not know, or any place he had not been. James Bond had been around for a long time
as long, in fact, as Ian Fleming had been dreaming himself into fantasy situations. When he finally emerged on paper, 007 was a toughened-up younger-brother version of Ian himself: more straightforward, less interesting, the kind of young hothead Ian might have been had he not valued power above adventure. — Henry Chancellor

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong. — Henry James

This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They — Henry James

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. — James Wood

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty. — Oscar Wilde

It was amusing, in such lightness of air, that the Prince should again present himself only to speak for the Princess, so unfortunately unable again to leave home; and that Mrs Verver should as regularly figure as an embodied, a beautifully deprecating apology for her husband, who was all geniality and humility among his own treasures, but as to whom the legend had grown up that he couldn't bear, with the height of his standards and the tone of the company, in the way of sofas and cabinets, habitually kept by him, the irritation and depression to which promiscuous visiting, even at pompous houses, had been found to expose him. — Henry James

One is oneself a fine consequence. — Henry James

To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing - and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine. — Henry James

Er smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it. — Henry James

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

[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you. — Henry James

He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn't make out very well what it conveyed. Then he bent over his mother, kissing her. "My news isn't particularly satisfactory. I'm going for you." "Oh you humbug!" she replied. But she was of course delighted. CHAPTER — Henry James

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so. — Henry James

There is always a place for chance in things. — Henry James

She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. — Henry James

Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic. — Henry James

Rush? not in the least. I take it uncommon easy." "Ah I'm bound to say you do!" Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with inconsequence. I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a want of consideration on the young man's part, arising perhaps from selfishness. His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to struggle alone. But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn't sit too heavily. He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people. Tall and strong, — Henry James

the company - that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage. America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and a slow passage (which at that season of the year would probably also be a fine one) was a guarantee of ten or twelve days of fresh air. I strolled down — Henry James

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. — Henry James

One need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely sensible to the charm of an English country church ... — Henry James

Henry James proposed asking of art three modest and appropriate questions: What is the artist trying to do? Does he do it? Was it worth doing? — Robert Adams

SHE COULDN'T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm - or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The — Henry James

It is important to bear in mind the now commonly accepted fact that in its primitive stages, religion had nothing to do with morals as understood by us today. — James Henry Breasted

It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be. — Henry James

I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. — Henry James

What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something - and this reached him with a pang - that he, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage? ... The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. — Henry James

The ladies of St. James's! They're painted to the eyes; Their white is stays for ever, Their red it never dies; But Phyllida, my Phillida! Her colour comes and goes; It trembles to a lily,
It wavers to a rose. — Henry Austin Dobson

Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James. — Willa Cather

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition. — Henry James

Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form — Henry James

There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian. — David Henry Hwang

He was a dim secondary social success
and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks
just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of 'ombres chinoises' [French: "shadow play"]. — Henry James

Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people. — Henry James

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games — Henry James

She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones - the really clever ones - always understood her silliness. — Henry James

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked
oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!
the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. — Henry James

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie. — Henry James

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness. — Henry James

Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature? — Dan Simmons

Because they will want me in Edinburgh to make sure that the Scottish king holds to the new alliance with England. They'll want me to hold him in friendship with Henry. They'll think that if I am queen in Scotland then James will never invade my son-in-law's kingdom." "And?" I whisper. "They're wrong," she says vengefully. "They're so very wrong. The day that I am Queen of Scotland with an army to command and a husband to advise, I won't serve Henry Tudor. I won't persuade my husband to keep a peace treaty with Henry. If I were strong enough and could command the allies I would need, I would march against Henry Tudor myself, come south with an army of terror. — Philippa Gregory

One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable - embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? — Henry James

You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left. — Henry James

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book. — Antonia Fraser

It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own). — Henry James

I would live for you still - if I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying. "But I can't!" she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. — Henry James

We grow in part by confessing our faults and weaknesses to each other (James 5:16; Eccl. 4:10). If we are always being strong and without needs, we are not growing, and we are setting ourselves up for a very dangerous fall. — Henry Cloud

I assure you, if Uncle Henry had stepped out from among the trees in a little copse which borders the path at one place, carrying his head under his arm, I should have been very little more uncomfortable than I was. To tell you the truth, I was rather expecting something of the kind. — M.R. James

Typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She — Henry James

I don't like it, but I'm a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don't like. — Henry James

She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead — 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 know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying
I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again
in fact you've admitted to me as much
that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me. — Henry James

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

When the congregation began to disperse, a number of persons, chiefly ladies, waited for him near the pulpit, and, as he came down, met him with greetings and compliments. Nora watched him from her place, listening, smiling and passing his handkerchief over his forehead. At last they relieved him, and he came up to her. She remembered for years afterward the strange half-smile on his face. There was something in it like a pair of eyes peeping over a wall. It seemed to express so fine an acquiescence in what she had done, that, for the moment, she had a startled sense of having committed herself to something. He gave her his hand, without manifesting any surprise. "How — Henry James

Mary Henry ought to write romance novels. She has a way of embellishing that most authors would envy. — Sandy James

Don't underestimate the value of irony - it is extremely valuable. — Henry James

I adore a moat,' said Isabel. 'Good-bye. — Henry James

Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation - in the face now of Jim's silence in particular - but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real? — Henry James

There is but little room for doubt that Egypt led the way in the creation of the earliest known group of civilizations which arose on both sides of the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia in the fourth millennium B.C. — James Henry Breasted

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

In time, the media was fawning over Henry Stein like Barack Obama in 2008; he represented something different. Governor Stein began holding FP rallies across the country, attracting tens of thousands of supporters, waving signs and willing to plaster their entire neighborhoods with as much propaganda as they could get their hands on. After winning two terms as governor in Florida, it became inevitable that he should be a candidate for President of the United States in 2036. Henry — James Rosone

... a prudent archer has always a second bowstring — Henry James

I was a screen
I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would. — Henry James

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

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be? — 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