Quotes from Henry James

Then it hasn't been love, said May Bartram. Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable, he explained.

Limpezimea excesiv? a candorii ei era aproape provocatoare, ?i, pentru moment, am avut senza?ia c? a? fi ob?inut rezultate mai satisf?c?toare dac? ar fi fost mai pu?in naiv?.

If she is to have a fall," said Mrs. Almond, with a gentle laugh, "we must spread as many carpets as we can." And she carried out this idea by showing a great deal of motherly kindness to the girl.

He found himself supposing innumerable and wonderful things.

She drank deep at the well of self-pity, but found its waters brackish.

Vorbeam cu chibzuit? premeditare, dar, pe m?sur? ce cuvintele mele deveneau sonore, m? izbea imprudenÈ›a lor. TotuÈ™i, le d?deam drumul la noroc È™i nu-mi p?rea r?u, fiindc?, la urma urmei, poate c? b?trîna va fi dispus? s? negocieze.

The Turn of the Screw" has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

Her memory's your love. You want no other.

You were reserved for my future

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his - attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.

However British you may be, I am more British still.

Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

It has made me better loving you…it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter."