Quotes from Henry James

Ma le riflessioni sono un magro conforto: l'unica consolazione che conti al mondo è non essere stati stupidi, uno stato di grazia del quale, senza dubbio, io non godrò mai.

They indeed had been wondrous for others while he was but wondrous for himself; which, however, was exactly the cause of his haste to renew the wonder by getting back, as he might put it, into his own presence. That had quickened his steps and checked his delay. If his visit was prompt it was because he had been separated so long from the part of himself that alone he now valued.

She wants to be magnificent. She is, said the Colonel almost cynically. She wants--his wife now had it fast to be thoroughly superior, and she's capable of that. Of wanting to? Of carrying out her idea. And what IS her idea? To see Maggie through. Bob Assingham wondered. Through what? Through everything. She KNOWS the Prince.

She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips—it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.

Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be.

him—ce genie-la. Every nation has its own ideals of every

Y]ou are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don't think, don't feel, any more than you can help, don't conclude or decide—don't do anything but wait.

I don't see why I should regard what is done here," said Bessie Alden. "Why should I suffer the restrictions of a society of which I enjoy none of the privileges?

To project yourself into a consciousness of a person essentially your opposite requires the audacity of great genius; and even men of genius are cautious in approaching the problem.

They once more, in spite of this vagueness, exchanged a look—a look that was perhaps the longest yet.

You Americans have such odd ways! the Baroness declared. You never ask anything outright; there seem to be so many things you can't talk about. ................. We don't like to tread upon people's toes (Chapter 6)

You see, I believe greatly in the influence of women. Living with women helps to make a man a gentleman. (Chapter 7)

Longueville, every morning after breakfast, took a turn in the great square of Siena—the vast piazza, shaped like a horse-shoe, where the market is held beneath the windows of that crenellated palace from whose overhanging cornice a tall, straight tower springs up with a movement as light as that of a single plume in the bonnet of a captain.

I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often entertain me; (Chapter 7)

Europe seems to me much larger than America. (Chapter 12)

A woman's husband, you know, is supposed to be her second self; (Chapter 12)

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Mamie made them easy as he couldn't have begun to do, and yet it could only have cost her more than he should ever have had to spend.

Bedizened in this unnatural garb Rosalind stood before the mirror, plunging a long look into its depths and reading heaven knows what audacious visions.

BOOK ELEVENTH

Imprimis: I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best.

On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of the sun, the terror of something more than death.

He put out his hand for good-bye with a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.

The natural way for a child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton and her pudding or her bath and her nap.