Quotes from Henry James

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business, in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.

Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe.

Live all you can. It's a mistake not to.

She believed just then that to let him take her in his arms would be the next thing to her dying. This belief, for a moment, was a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink.

Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?

He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.

furnished, but by no means decorated

A family is a little world within doors; the miniature resemblance of the great worls without.

It seemed to him that he both knew too much to imagine [the child's] simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority—which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn infallibly to the vindictive.

She kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated maneuvers, at the word of command. Just now she had given it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of German Thought

One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable—embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak?

The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had gone.

Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.

How on the other hand could I make a reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?

there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes.

Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.

Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly here be things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to rest.

The chief impression produced on Isabel's spirit by this criticism, was that the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object

That had been the real beginning—the beginning of everything else.

Middlemarch] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole.

I think I could die without its being noticed.