Quotes from Henry James

Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation – a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist. He

So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. And what did the former governess die of? – of so much respectability? Our friend's answer was prompt. That will come out. I don't anticipate.

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke—and we'll go home as fast as we can!

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to TWO children—? We

Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. 'My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.' 'Of course we do. That's just the fun of it!' said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: 'Don't tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.

It was the first time, in a manner, that I had known space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature.

prevaricated

Oh, it was a trap — not designed but deep — to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.

He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence.

Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital?

The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass.

if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

He was burdened, poor Strether—it had better be confessed at the outset—with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

It really doesn't matter where I am now. I've exhausted all remedies, I've swallowed all climates.

She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her

An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.

and with this reminder other things came to her -- how strange it was that, with all allowance for their merit, it should befall some people to be so inordinantly valued, quoted, as they said in the stock-market, so high, and how still stranger, perhaps, that there should be cases in which, for some reason, one didn't mind the so frequently marked absence in them of the purpose really to represent their price.

There's nothing so magnificent - for making others feel you - as to have no imagination.

Well, I am rather afraid of that visit, said Clifford. It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again. The Baroness looked at him a moment. My dear child, she said, there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman--probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis.

If I could stay — For me you'll always be here, she softly interrupted.

It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her.

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened.