Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

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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
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

Henry James
She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.

Henry James
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

Henry James
There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.

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

Henry James
The great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

Henry James
You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!

Henry James
To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?

Henry James
She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.

Henry James
To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.

Henry James
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

Henry James
Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Henry James
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.

Henry James