Henry James Quotes

204 Sourced Quotes

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Henry James
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Henry James
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.

Henry James
Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.

Henry James
He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.

Henry James
"If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."

Henry James
Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.

Henry James
She 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 a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.... but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.

Henry James
"I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them."

Henry James
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.

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

Henry James
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

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

Henry James
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.

Henry James
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Henry James
My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.

Henry James
He is outside of everything, and an 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
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Henry James
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

Henry James
She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Henry James
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

Henry James
You 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 James
Things are always different than what they might be.... If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

Henry James
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.

Henry James
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.

Henry James
To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.

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

Henry James
A novel is in its broadest sense a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.

Henry James
She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.

Henry James