Quotes from Henry James

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.

She saw herself in this connexion without detachment – saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If

It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.

His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.

But he's all in a muddle about himself, his position, his power, and indeed about everything in the world. He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.

Her real offense was having a mind of her own.

Isabel, he went on suddenly, I wish it were over for you. She answered nothing; she had burst into sobs; she remained so, with her buried face. He lay silent, listening to her sobs; at last he gave a long groan.

His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being 'fine'.

But I was to be later on so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill.

You did something once — you know it. O Ralph, you've been everything! What have I done for you — what can I do to-day? I would die if you could live. But I don't wish you to live; I would die myself, not to lose you. Her voice was as broken as his own and full of tears and anguish. You won't lose me — you'll keep me. Keep me in your heart; I shall be nearer to you than I've ever been.

But these fancies were not marked enough not not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me.

She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.

I was dazzled by their loveliness.

It all left her, as she wandered off, with the strangest of impressions – the sense, forced upon her as never yet, of an appeal, a positive confidence, from the four pairs of eyes, that was deeper than any negation and that seemed to speak on the part of each for some relation to be contrived by her, a relation with herself, which would spare the individual the danger, the actual present strain, of the relation with the others. They

You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.

You can do a great many things if you're rich which would be severely criticised if you were poor. You can go and come, you can travel alone, you can have your own establishment: I mean of course if you'll take a companion—some decayed gentlewoman, with a darned cashmere and dyed hair, who paints on velvet.

But it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always.

What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?

There was a kind of violence in some of her impulses.

The flash of this knowledge — for it was knowledge in the midst of dread — produced in me the most extraordinary effect.

The day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees.

Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate

His egotism lay like a serpent in a bank of flowers.

Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.' 'They would uncommonly suit you,' he frankly returned. 'Oh yes, I see myself!