There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
Henry JamesIn a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.
Henry JamesI donโt think I pity her. She doesnโt strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I donโt know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I donโt insist upon that. Itโs her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.
Henry JamesThe image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.
Henry James