Quotes from Henry James

I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them--I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say.

They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.

Life is all a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon.

But you must remember that justice to a lovely being is after all a florid sort of sentiment.

Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.

was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk.

I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.

Life might prove difficult—was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each other, and that was everything.

One never said the things one wanted--one remembered them an hour afterward. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't, simply from a sense that one had to say something. Such a sense was upsetting; it muddled one's wits.

It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.

It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.

Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.

There's no generosity without some sacrifice.

THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!

But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don't know.

To her mind there was nothing of the infinite about Mrs. Penniman; Catherine saw her all at once, as it were, and was not dazzled by the apparition; whereas her father's great faculties seemed, as they stretched away, to lose themselves in a sort of luminous vagueness, which indicated, not that they stopped, but that Catherine's own mind ceased to follow them.

The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one's will and one's inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one's organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.

Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.

When you are successful you naturally feel more at home

He has depths of silence—which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it's always something he has seen or felt for himself—never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.

The sense of success -the most agreeable emotion of the human heart

And she really had tones to make justice weep.

She envied the security of valuable 'pieces' which change by no hair's breadth, only grow in value, while their owners lose inch by inch youth, happiness, beauty[.]

She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone.