Quotes from Henry James

Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him.

used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some

What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live.

Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

I don't know what's the matter with you, she observed to him once; but I suspect you're a great humbug.

They had built strong and piled high – based as it was on such appearances – their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo

It's very easy to laugh at her but it is not easy to be as brave as she.

There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery.

The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion our task. The rest is the madness of art.

She does everything beautifully. She's complete.

this fashioning of a wife to order.

The ground had quite fallen away from it, yet no resemblance whatever to the mother had supervened.

The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung.

A narrow grave-yard in the heart of a bustling, indifferent city, seen from the windows of a gloomy-looking inn, is at no time an object of enlivening suggestion; and the spectacle is not at its best when the mouldy tombstones and funereal umbrage have received the ineffectual refreshment of a dull, moist snow-fall.

He's a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That's why he won't be happy.

What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention—spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in the hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.

We don't run away from people unless we fear them and... we don't fear them unless we know that we are unarmed.

Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained.

Supreme beauty suddenly revealed is apt to strike us as a possible illusion playing with our desire—instant freedom with it to strike us as a possible rashness. This fortunately

I just say this: that I think it's a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don't live in a fool's paradise.

Order is the dream of man, but chaos is the law of nature.

One went through the vain motions, but it was mostly a waste of life.

De dragul vieÅ£ii, trebuie s? ne cre?m propriul antidot împotriva realit??ii