Henry James Quotes - Page 9

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.

I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.

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.

The "germ," wherever gathered, has ever been for me, "the germ of a story," and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.

His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.

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.

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

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

Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.

I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.(Sir Edmund Orme)

Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.

She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.

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!

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

It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.

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

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

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

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?

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

The fatal futility of Fact.

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

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.

Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

She is written in a foreign tongue.