Quotes from Henry James

I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.

he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable.

She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine.

The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.

Poor Catherine's dignity was not aggressive; it never sat in state; but if you pushed far enough you could find it. Her father had pushed very far.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the ceremony known as afternoon tea

Money is a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet

I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain - it can't spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.

Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whilst with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.

He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.

He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.

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.

Keep making the movements of life.

For all I know,he may be a prince in disguise; he rather looks like one, by the way- like a prince who has abdicated in a fit of magnanimity, and has been in a state of disgust ever since.

To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text

She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.

The whole of anything, is never told.

She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper, she might have looked out on the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side--a place which became, to the child's imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

I keep a band of music in my ante-room, he said once to her. It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing's going on within.

She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead

Is that another sort of joke? asked the old man. You've no excuse for being bored anywhere. When I was your age I had never heard of such a thing.

You must come to Lockleigh again, said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton—the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: I'm afraid I can never come again.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.