Quotes from Henry James

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.

We must for dear life make our own counter-realities.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Be not afraid of life believe that life is worth living and your belief will create the fact.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

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.

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

Love has nothing to do with good reasons.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

If this was love, love had been overrated.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Excellence does not require perfection.

Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.