Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

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

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
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
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
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
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

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

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
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
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
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
"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
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
"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
What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.

Henry James
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Henry James
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do." "So as to do them?" asked her aunt. "So as to choose." said Isabel

Henry James
She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] [...]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.

Henry James
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

Henry James
You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.

Henry James
Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.

Henry James
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Henry James
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Henry James
To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.

Henry James
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.

Henry James
The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.

Henry James
To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.

Henry James