Quotes from Henry James

No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which—and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet—there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.

What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something—and this reached him with a pang—that he, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end.  No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?... The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. 

Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.

Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.

One's theories, after all, matter little, it is one's humor that is the great thing.

You decline?" he cried, almost defiantly. " `Decline' isn't the word. A man doesn't decline an insult.

He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew there are disappointments that last as long as life.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

We must feel everything, everything we can. We are here for that.

There is no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding

That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.

She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain.

Ah, one doesn't give up one's country any more than one gives UP one's grandmother. They're both antecedent to choice—elements of one's composition that are not to be eliminated.

She was afraid,' said Mrs. Bread, very confidently; 'she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. That was the real trouble, sir. She was like a fair peach, I may say, with just one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature.

This purpose had not been preponderantly to make money--it had been rather to learn something and to do something. To learn something interesting, and to do something useful--this was, roughly speaking, the programme he had sketched, and of which the accident of his wife having an income appeared to him in no degree to modify the validity.

Then again I shifted my eyes-I faced what I had to face.

He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated.

And much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton.

Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.

It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever.

I've been deceived too often; I've ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.

if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors.

The Press, my child," Bight said, "is the watchdog of civilisation, and the watchdog happens to be – it can't be helped – in a chronic state of rabies.

she freely admitted that of old she had been a little mad, and now she pretended to be perfectly sane.