Quotes from Henry James

Nevertheless, he had offered her a home under his own roof, which Lavinia accepted with the alacrity of a woman who had spent the ten years of her married life in the town of Poughkeepsie.

When I say she exaggerates I don't mean it in the vulgar sense—that she boasts, overstates, gives too fine an account of herself. I mean literally that she pushes the search for perfection too far—that her merits are in themselves overstrained. She's too good, too kind, too clever, too learned, too accomplished, too everything. She's too complete, in a word. I confess to you that she acts on my nerves […].

The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.

My first impulse is always to behave, about everything, as if I feared complications. But I don't fear them— I really like them. They're quite my element.

I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.

He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.

If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles.

If Quint—on your remonstrance at the time you speak of—was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find myself guessing, was that you were another.

She was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these—when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her

sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.

I didn't refuse often enough.

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

Catherine had not understood all that she said; her attention was given to enjoying Marian's ease of manner and flow of ideas.

Je m'ennuie à mort parfois moi-même. Alors il me paraît normal que je puisse t'ennuyer.

Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?

She [was] . . . one of those convenient types who don't keep you explaining --minds with doors as numerous as the many-tongued clusters of confessionals at St. Peters.

So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. It isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so. Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I point that out. She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. I can't indeed resist you. Then there we are! said Strether.

In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That is not the deepest thing; there is something deeper.

I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.

Try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost!

Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth? Well, at peace with you. Oh, 'peace'! he murmured with his eyes on the fire. The peace of having loved. He raised his eyes to her. Is that peace? Of having been loved, she went on. That is. Of having, she wound up, realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She had had all she wanted.

Mi piacciono i luoghi dove sono avvenute molte cose... anche tristi. Molte persone sono morte qui; era un luogo pieno di vita." ââ'¬Å"È questo che tu chiami pieno di vita?" "Voglio dire pieno di esperienze... di sentimenti e di dolori... E non solo di on solo di dolori, perché io sono stata molto felice, qui, da bambina.

Live all you can, it's a mistake not to

It was not that I didn't wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a secret at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?