Quotes from Henry James

People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.

I want to bring them down,—down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them—I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.

Era la hora dedicada a la ceremonia del té de la tarde y sabido es que, en derminadas circusntancias, hay en la vida muy pocas horas que puedan comparrse a ésa por el agrado y atractivo que ofrece a quines saben disfrutarla

But for a nice girl you do attract the most unnatural people.

She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte's view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.

Verdi's music did little to comfort him, and he left the theatre and walked homeward, without knowing his way, through the torturous, tragic streets of Rome, where heavier sorrows than his had been carried under the stars.

She sat with him at any rate, in the grey clearance—as sad as a winter dawn—made by their meeting.

Should you positively like to live here? I think I should like, said poor Milly after an instant, to die here.

It's very pleasant to be so well treated where one had least looked for it.

Agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was.

It's exactly the thing that I'm reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.

Women find their religion sometimes in strange exercises

Every one asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.

There were immensities between you.

We please the people we don't care for, we displease those we do!

Do you imagine I can see you suffer and not say a word?

I dare say, Densher granted, we were both thinking of her. You were neither of you thinking of any one else.

But he didn't, it happened, know the Munsters well enough to give the case much of a lift; so that they were left together as if over the mere laid table of conversation.

Is to bring about for them such a complexity of relations—unless indeed we call it a simplicity!—that the situation has to wind itself up. They want to go back.

And thus it seemed to her an act of devotion to conceal her misery from him. She concealed it elaborately; she was perpetually, in their talk, hanging out curtains and arranging screens.

You've not only dried up my tears; you've dried up my soul.

Her eyes] had taken hold of him straightaway, measuring him up and down as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled.

The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The

He goes very far, but it's quite possible he doesn't go far enough.