and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

What a lark! What a plunge!