Quotes from Henry James

The real offense, 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.

In art economy is always beauty.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayadère of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising — only these stand a chance.

I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

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

I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

So it has come at last—the Distinguished Thing.

The fatal futility of Fact.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

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

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.

I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

Vereker's secret… the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?… What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that…. The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have…. Live!

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

There are few things more exciting to me… than a psychological reason.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.