Henry James Quotes

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.

Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

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

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

What we find to love or to hate comes to us as a substitute for something else.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

It is in our nature to enjoy atrocity so long as it continues to shock and remains comfortably removed from our own lives.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

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.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

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

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

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.

My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.

We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

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

I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

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

Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

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

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.

... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.

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.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

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

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

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!

Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.

I have lived too long in foreign parts

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.

Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.

The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.

Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.

Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation.

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.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.