Quotes from Henry James

The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements—an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.

The whole past is between them.

speakers responsible.  And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the

Deep in her breast she believed that he had invested his all in her happiness, while the others had invested only a part.

Fancy me between Scylla and Charybdis.

He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply—for that was the only way to see it—been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.

Ah, I must see Ralph! Isabel wailed; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion had looked for; but in a tone of far-reaching, infinite sadness.

She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There

In Isabel's mind today there was nothing clear; there was a confusion of regrets, a complication of fears.

Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it—to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality!

some degree to her loss.  There was an odd pang for me in seeing her move about alone; I felt somehow responsible for it and asked myself why I couldn't have kept my hands off.  I had seen Jasper in the smoking-room more

Oh he'll come back!" I said, glancing at his place.  The repast continued and when it was finished I screwed my chair round to leave the table.  Mrs. Peck performed the same movement and we quitted the saloon

Certainly, the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should! 'You dress very well . . .' 'Possibly; but I don't care to be judged by that. My clothes may express the dressmaker, but they don't express me. To begin with, it's not my own choice that I wear them; they are imposed upon me by society.

One is that people, on the whole, had better not marry their cousins. Another is that people in an advanced stage of pulmonary disorder had better not marry at all.

Wasn't that what women always said they wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make husbands.

Do you know I sometimes think that I'm a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.

Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. She had moments in her journey from Rome which were almost as good as being dead. She sat in her corner, so motionless, so passive, simply with the sense of being carried, so detached from hope and regret . . .

He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.

some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words — "Do YOU?" — more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.

But she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so little. Her friend easily recognized it, and with it the worth of the other's fidelity. She had crossed the stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed that Isabel was sad.

I like so many things! If a thing strikes me with a certain intensity I accept it. I don't want to swagger, but I suppose I'm rather versatile.

At present, with her sense that the note of change had been struck, came gradually a host of images of the things she was leaving behind her.