Quotes from Henry James

Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one, but it was eminently personal. He was unperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art… what we are talking about—and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

If I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience and experience only," I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

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

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

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.

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.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy . what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it --this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self, but the point is not only to get out, you must stay out and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

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

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

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

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

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.