Henry James Quotes

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Excellence does not require perfection.

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

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.

I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t 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 don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

If you haven't had your life what have you had?

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

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.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

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!

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

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.

Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

When I am wicked I am in high spirits.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

The 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.

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.

I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.