Quotes from Henry James

Wherever we go we carry this burden of our personal consciousness and wherever we step we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton umbrella to obstruct the prospect and obscure the light of heaven.

the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object.

They strike one, above all, as giving no account of themselves in any terms already consecrated by human use; to this inarticulate state they probably form, collectively, the most unprecedented of monuments; abysmal the mystery of what they think, what they feel, what they want, what they suppose themselves to be saying.

Anger does not last, that way, for years. But there are other things. Impressions last, when they have been strong.

It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.

Observe perpetually!

since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.

I used to call her, in my stupidity — for want of anything better — a dove

The more you know the more unhappy you are

You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.

I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?

Oh, said Catherine, with some eagerness, it doesn't take long to like a person—when once you begin.

A fig for my opinion! If you fall in love with Mr. Osmond what will you care for that? Not much, probably. But meanwhile it has a certain importance. The more information one has about one's dangers the better. I don't agree to that—it may make them dangers. We know too much about people in these days; we hear too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed with personalities. Don't mind anything any one tells you about any one else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.

What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one's self?

She has only one fault; too many ideas.

Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline - there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less.

Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.

All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.

I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.

New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.

There was a dumb misery about him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a woman is angry when she has been in the wrong.