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 JamesYou must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
Henry JamesLive as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
Henry JamesIt is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
Henry JamesThe 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 JamesMake (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.
Henry JamesThe 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 JamesThough there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry JamesSummer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry JamesLittle by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
Henry JamesTo believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
Henry JamesThe 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 JamesPeople can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.
Henry JamesThe 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 JamesIf you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
Henry James...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
Henry JamesWhat is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Henry JamesYou seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.
Henry JamesIt 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 JamesThe deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.
Henry James...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.
Henry James..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry JamesI'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 JamesOne can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Henry JamesHer reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry JamesShe took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.
Henry JamesA man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
Henry JamesShe envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
Henry JamesShe had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
Henry James