Henry James Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!

Henry James
So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing.

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

Henry James
However British you may be, I am more British still.

Henry James
The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"

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

Henry James
I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Henry James
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

Henry James
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

Henry James
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Henry James
Tell the boys to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously.

Henry James
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

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

Henry James
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

Henry James
I could come back to America…to die—but never, never to live.

Henry James
There is no difficulty in beginning; the trouble is to leave off!

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

Henry James
Since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

Henry James
Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!

Henry James
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.

Henry James
There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding.

Henry James
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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

Henry James
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

Henry James
It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

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

Henry James
Reason is the light of science. Revelation is the light of philosophy.

Henry James
The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.

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

Henry James
Even medical families cannot escape the more insidious forms of disease...

Henry James