Henry James Quotes

204 Sourced Quotes

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

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 James
You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches—a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

Henry James
Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.

Henry James
Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Henry James
With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

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

Henry James
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

Henry James
His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual.

Henry James
He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come.

Henry James
There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

Henry James
Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: [...].

Henry James
The time-honored bread sauce of the happy ending.

Henry James
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

Henry James
She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.

Henry James
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.

Henry James
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

Henry James
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

Henry James
The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

Henry James
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.

Henry James
No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see—what I don't fear!

Henry James
Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.

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
The note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.

Henry James
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnée: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it....If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

Henry James
It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life except play games.

Henry James
I'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 James
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

Henry James