Quotes from Henry James

What it accordingly amounted to for him was that he had to take full in the face a fresh attribution of ignorance. He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn't know; but he had borne them because in the first place they were private and because in the second they practically conveyed a tribute.

We may sometimes point out a road we are unable to follow.

It simply appeared to him proper and reasonable that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her fortune on her back. (...)

We've had, as it seems to me, such quite beautiful days together that I hope it won't come to you too much as a shock when I ask if you think you could regard me with any satisfaction as a husband.

A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or, better still, didn't care if they didn't.

Nora seemed by instinct to have perceived the fitness of her not speaking of her own affairs, and indeed displayed in the matter a precocious good taste.

The way certain classes arrogate to themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some human beings the people, and the people only, and others not? I am of the people myself, I have worked all my days like a knife-grinder, and I have really never changed.

But that is another matter. There is really too much to say.

In Paris such debts are tacit.

Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up.

As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most?

And in time-his voice rose-there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

Una novela es una cosa viva, toda una y continua, como cualquier otro organismo, y en proporción a como vive se descubrirá, creo yo, que en cada una de las partes hay algo de cada una de las demás partes.

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.

It had freely been noted for him that he might be received as a dog among skittles, but that was on the basis of the old quantity.

He knew his antenatal history, knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before him. What was his frank judgement of so much of its ugliness, he asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of his humility? What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn't do he must make something different.

The world as it stands is no illusion.

She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth!

The fresh diffused light of the salon made them clear and important; they were finished creations in their way, and ranged there motionless on their green bench, were almost as much on exhibition as if they had been hung on the line.

You take things easily, and you have fewer prejudices even than I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three or four. Happy man, you are strong and you are free.

There isn't a thing I can imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity.

Mr. Offord's drawing-room was indeed Brooksmith's garden, his pruned and tended human parterre, and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely owing to his supervision.

Could one in those days feel anything with force, whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense and impact?—so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as an aspect, even, distinguishably, a composition.

La experiencia no es nunca limitada, y no es jamás completa; es una sensibilidad inmensa, una especie de enorme tela de araña de los más finos hilos de seda suspendida en la cámara de la conciencia, y que capta en su tejido todas las particularidades llevadas por el aire.