Quotes from Henry James

The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left.

I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience—or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication 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, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.

Nothing is my last word on anything.

We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness.

It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside....

It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it. For sheer terror? I remember asking. He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. For dreadful — dreadfulness! Oh, how delicious! cried one of the women.

Yes, that's the bore of comfort, said Lord Warburton. We only know when we're uncomfortable.

there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other...

The increasing seriousness of things, then that's the great opportunity of jokes.

When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them

one should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company.

I'll watch with you.

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.

London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

And her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world.

Besides, he was a philosopher; he smoked a good many cigars over his disappointment, and in the fulness of time he got used to it.