Quotes from Henry James

He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a moment, with his hands behind him, giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop. "Do you know I'm very much afraid of it – of that remarkable mind of yours?

Our relation, all round, exists--it's a reality, and a very good one; we're mixed up, so to speak, and it's too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it

Ada tiga hal penting dalam hidup ini. Pertama adalah kebaikan hati. Kedua, kebaikan hati. Ketiga, kebaikan hati juga.

Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness.

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.

To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed. They will champion the causes of life's underdogs, forging a society without class discrimination. They will supply humanity with music and beauty as it has never known. They will endure.

To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.

Am I grave?', he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.' 'You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.

If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.

It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else.

I am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure. (...) 'Thank goodness you're a failure- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you- look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour?

I should think that to hear such lovely music as that would really make him feel better. The lady gave a discriminating smile. "I am afraid there are moments in life when even Beethoven has nothing to say to us. We must admit, however, that they are our worst moments.

He surveyed the edifice from the outside, and admired it greatly; he looked in at the windows, and received an impression of proportions equally fair. But he felt that he saw it only by glimpses, and that he had not yet stood under the roof. The door was fastened, and although he had keys in his pocket he had a conviction that none of them would fit. She was intelligent and generous; it was a fine free nature, but what was she going to do with herself?

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

Do you know I love you ? - I'm sure I don't care whether you do or not !

There's no way to do that, Miss Archer. I won't say that if you refuse me you'll kill me; I shall not die of it. But I shall do worse; I shall live to no purpose.

I like places in which things have happened — even if they're sad things.

It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky... (Sir Edmund Orme)