Quotes from Henry James

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

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

It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games

My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe. Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, My father's in Schenectady.

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

I ought to tell you I'm probably your cousin.

There is no generosity without sacrifice.

Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!

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.

His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticize would be a peculiarly discreditable act.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

I could only get on at all by taking nature into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur.

Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not 'dressed,' and long fine hands which were--possibly--not clean.

It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.

Things are always different from what they might be.

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.