Quotes About Henry James

He said at another time that she had no heart; and he added in a moment that she had given it all away—in small pieces, like a frosted wedding-cake.

Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.

He had brought home to her, and always by remarks that were really quite soundless, the conception, hitherto ungrapsed, of some complete use of her wealth itself, some use of it as a counter-move to fate.

Agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was.

The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle—a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The

The superiority you discern in me," she concurred, "announces my futility. If you knew," she sighed, "the dreams of my youth!" But our realities are what has brought us together. We're beaten brothers in arms.

Don't you know the soul is an immortal principle? How can it suffer alteration? I don't believe at all that it's an immortal principle. I believe it can perfectly be destroyed. That's what has happened to mine, which was a very good one to start with; and it's you I have to thank for it. You're very bad, she added with gravity in her emphasis.

The light of his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion's face as he again met it; and he completed his demonstration.

Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.

some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile.

It little matters, for relief arrived. I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.

I don't know, however, what right I have to ask a service of you. You're the person in the world who has most right, he answered. I've given you assurances that I've never given any one else.

Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some.

What it all amounted to, oddly enough, was that in his finally so simplified world this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live.

The American girl isn't ANY girl; she's a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.

He's a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That's why he won't be happy.

She was, moreover, mistress of a very pretty little fortune, and was accounted clever without detriment to her amiability and amiable without detriment to her wit.

I have never entertained an idea. Ideas often entertain me; (Chapter 7)

On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of the sun, the terror of something more than death.

He put out his hand for good-bye with a "Splendid, splendid, splendid!" And he left her, in her splendour, still waiting for little Bilham.

Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his faculties - his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his senses - had a hand in the game. (Chapter 4)

That's a compliment, said Gertrude. I put all the compliments I receive into a little money-jug that has a slit in the side. I shake them up and down, and they rattle. There are not many yet - only two or three. (Chapter 6)

The Turn of the Screw" has been turned and returned through a large number of critical approaches, perhaps only rivaled in this regard by Hamlet. The spectrum of critical approaches ranges from Freudian, to feminist, to gay, to materialist, partly because the complexity of the first-person narrative lends itself to analysis and partly because the tale also offers an engaging twist on the traditional genre of the ghost story.

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.