Quotes from Henry James

The Golden Bowl, 1904 It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pavements were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours less acceptable, rose from the earth.

In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which everything is saved by it.

a prudent archer has always a second bowstring

What could be more dreary than final interviews ? One never said the things one wanted—one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn't,simply from a sense that one had to say something.

I don't know why we live, but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup.

She was the blessing that had now become his need, and what could prove it better than that without her he had lost himself?

He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, on his face, on the tomb.

She had effaced herself, when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was. ...he would have liked her to have nothing of her own but her pretty appearance. She had too many ideas for herself, but that was what one married for, to share them with someone else.

They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything.

he wished to do everything because he was lucid and quiet

They girded their loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel.

Life wears us, uses us -- but we wear it and use it in return, and it is blind, whereas we, after a fashion, see.

We must allow the artist his subject. It is only what he makes of it that we can judge.

I'm afraid I'm too ill." "Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light.

This small struggle sprang not a little, in its way, from the same impulse that had now carried him across to Notre Dame; the impulse to let things be, to give them time to justify themselves or at least to pass.

Yes, you're changed; you've got new ideas over here, her friend continued. I hope so, said Isabel, one should get as many new ideas as possible. Yes, but they shouldn't interfere with the old ones when the old ones have been the right ones.

He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous

Of late, it was not to be denied, literature had seemed a fading light....

Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his faculties - his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his senses - had a hand in the game. (Chapter 4)

Did he live in a false world, a world that had grown simply to suit him, and was his present slight irritation—in the face now of Jim's silence in particular—but the alarm of the vain thing menaced by the touch of the real?

It was always the case for him in these counsels that each of his remarks, as it came, seemed to drop into a deeper well. He had at all events to wait a moment to hear the slight splash of this one.

nobody in the house but the governess was in the governess's plight;

I have never studied; I have had no training. I do a little of everything, and nothing well. I am only an amateur. (Chapter 5)

All my life had taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to have committed itself to keep astare