Henry James Fansite
Henry James Quotes
• A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really understand them is bad morals.
• What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
• The ever important murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"
• An Englishman is never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
• Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
• Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
• Deep experience is never peaceful.
• To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
• She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.
• Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
• However British you may be, I am more British still.
• Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
• New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
• I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
• Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
• She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
• I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
• He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
• I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
• Life's too short for chess
• There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
• I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth, I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
• Ideas are, in truth, force.
• I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
• If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
• In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
• In art, economy is always beauty.
• It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
• It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
• It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
• Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?
• Life is a predicament which precedes death.
• Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
• People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
• One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
• Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.
• Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
• Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.
• The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
• There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
• She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
• The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
• The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
• The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
• The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
• There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
• The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
• It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.
• There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
• She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.
• Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
• To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
• Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
• What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
• To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
• Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
• We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
• Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
• No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools / no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class / no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.
• Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, peolpe of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
Henry James Novels
1917 - The Sense of the Past (unfinished)
1917 - The Ivory Tower (unfinished)
1911 - The Outcry
1908 - The Whole Family
1904 - The Golden Bowl
1903 - The Ambassadors
1902 - The Wings of the Dove
1901 - The Sacred Fount
1899 - The Awkward Age
1897 - What Maisie Knew
1897 - The Spoils of Poynton
1896 - The Other House
1890 - The Tragic Muse
1888 - The Reverberator
1886 - The Princess Casamassima
1886 - The Bostonians
1881 - The Portrait of a Lady
1880 - Washington Square
1879 - Confidence
1878 - The Europeans
1877 - The American
1875 - Roderick Hudson
1871 - Watch and Ward
Henry James Novellas
1908 - The Jolly Corner
1903 - The Beast in the Jungle
1903 - The Birthplace
1900 - Mrs. Medwin
1900 - The Great Good Place
1899 - Paste
1899 - Europe
1898 - In the Cage
1898 - The Turn of the Screw
1895 - The Altar of the Dead
1895 - The Next Time
1894 - The Coxon Fund
1894 - The Death of the Lion
1893 - The Middle Years
1892 - The Real Thing
1891 - The Pupil
1888 - A London Life
1888 - The Aspern Papers
1884 - The Author of Beltraffio
1879 - A Bundle of Letters
1878 - Daisy Miller
1874 - Madame de Mauves
1871 - A Passionate Pilgrim
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