Quotes from Henry James

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Love has nothing to do with good reasons.

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.

Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

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

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?" "Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see--that's my idea of happiness.

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more - this idea was as sweet as a vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land. ... but Isabel recognized, as it passed before her eyes, the quick vague shadow of a long future. She should never escape; she should last to the end.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.

his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.

Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.

It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.

She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones - the really clever ones - always understood her silliness.

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.

She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.

A second chance—that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

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