Henry James Quotes - Page 8

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.

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

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.

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 the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

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.

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

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

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

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

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.

One is oneself a fine consequence.

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

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

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

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

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.

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

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

I ought to tell you that I'm probably your cousin.