Quotes from Henry James

Was he in love with Gilbert Osmond's wife, and if so what comfort did he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature's own was this the service her husband had asked of her?

There was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before, at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life.

He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn't settled and she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn.

Takes him to her heart and yet thinks he cheats? Yes, said Kate—that's the way people are. What they think of their enemies, goodness knows, is bad enough; but I'm still more struck with what they think of their friends.

typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She

She likes to do everything for herself and has no belief in any one's power to help her.

There seemed to Isabel in these days something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had spent there the tears rose to her eyes.

The days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was the taste of suspense.

There were complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together than they were anything else.

Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.

I adore a moat,' said Isabel. 'Good-bye.

Her desire to think well of herself had at least the element of humility that it always needed to be supported by proof.

There was an element of dull rage in his consciousness of things.

I looked at the place with my heart beating as I had known it to do in the dentist's parlor.

But I care myself if I tell fibs; I never tell them unless there's something rather good to be gained.

Though I couldn't make out what she was talking of I was terribly frightened; the absence of a clue gave such a range to one's imagination. (Sir Edmund Orme)

It's her general air of being some one in particular that strikes me. Who is this rare creature, and what is she? Where did you find her, and how did you make her acquaintance?

I'm capable of nothing with regard to you . . . but just of being infernally in love with you.

Now that he was alone with her all the passion he had never stifled surged into his senses; it hummed in his eyes and made things swim round him.

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, "Ah me! I wish I were a widow!" Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather's weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.

When I tell you I love you it's simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn't say it if I didn't believe I should never see you again. It's the last time — let me pluck a single flower! I've no right to say that, I know; and you've no right to listen. But you don't listen; you never listen, you're always thinking of something else.

You're like a picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against the wall.

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.

Kuljeskelen täällä. En kyllästy tähän. Eikä minun pitäisikään - tämä sopii minulle niin hyvin. Jumaloin tätä paikkaa. Minulla ei ole pienintäkään halua luopua tästä. -Teistä olisi siis mieluisaa elää täällä? -Luullakseni minusta olisi mieluisaa kuolla täällä.