Henry James Quotes - Page 6

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.

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, 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.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

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

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.

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

Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

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.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

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

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

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

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

When I am wicked I am in high spirits.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.

I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.