Quotes from Henry James

When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.

I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour. As we were? As we were. But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. We shall never be again as we were!

She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.

There's no romance here but what you may have brought with you.

How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?

there were many things - perhaps even too many - New York could give; but this was felt to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave.

The golden bowl – as it was to have been.' And Maggie dwelt musingly on this obscured figure. 'The bowl with all our happiness in it. The bowl without the crack.

SHE COULDN'T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm—or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The

It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking into unlighted corners.

The old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness.

The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You're not enough in contact with reality — with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You're too fastidious; you've too many graceful illusions.

He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition ...

She's too personal—considering that she expects other people not to be. She walks in without knocking at the door." "Yes," Isabel admitted, "she doesn't sufficiently recognize the existence of knockers; and indeed I'm not sure that she doesn't think them rather a pretentious ornament. She thinks one's door should stand ajar.

But once in a while the best believer recognises the impulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the temple of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp.

It has not been a successful life.' 'No -- it has only been a beautiful one.

She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners.

I don't understand you.

I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm doing.

His secretary of many years' standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: 'When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.

The vice in the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate.

Take things more easily. Don't ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don't question your conscience so much—it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don't try so much to form your character—it's like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself.

I've thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I'm exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.

He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves?