Quotes from Henry James

I don't talk for your amusement.

She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.

Ah darling, goodness, I think, never brought any one out. Goodness, when it's real, precisely, rather keeps people IN.

One doesn't defend one's god; one's god is in himself a defense.

I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.

A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

Mrs. Penniman always, even in conversation, italicised her personal pronouns.

She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting.

the house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced , or is still pierceable, in its vast front , by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.

The years have touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded; it only hung more quietly on its stem.

Make up to a good one and marry here, and your life will become much more interesting.

She had never yet encountered a personage so exotic, and she always felt more at ease in the presence of anything strange. It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was inqiuitous.

When Milly smiled it was a public event—when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They

She had never met a woman who had less of that fault which is the principal obstacle to friendship - the air of reproducing the more tiresome parts of one's own personality.

Intelligent, unscrupulous, determined, and capable of seeing a man strangled without changing color.

My dear young lady,' said her distinguished friend, 'isn't to live exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?

Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes -- once they had gone a certain length -- that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love.

Oh we're not loved. We're not even hated. We're only just sweetly ignored.

Catherine, who was extremely modest, had no desire to shine, and on most social occasions, as they are called, you would have found her lurking in the background.

We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common - having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.