Quotes About Henry James

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

Sis took Eva to the public library and showed her how to get a card. Every week, Eva read her way through the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell. She dreamed of heroines from modest backgrounds attracting unprecedented attentions, soaring tales of love across social divides and sudden unexpected reversals of fortunes. In these pages, anything was possible, even for a girl like her.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn't either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.

Four times you drive around the block, the Porsche weaving in and out of the rain-slowed traffic like the essence of a Henry James sentence weaving in and out of prepositional phrases, dependent clauses, and parenthetical asides (periodically hitting the brakes to avoid misplacing a modifier).

Oh, I am very old fashioned about my literature taste. I like Henry James. I like George Elliot. I like Dostoyevsky. I like the old people. I really do. I like people who write big, fat, juicy novels you can get completely lost in!

Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one, but it was eminently personal. He was unperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial.

I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

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.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

This use of the vernacular became the fundamental framework for all but one of her novels and is particularly effective in her classic work Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, which is more closely related to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Jean Toomer's Cane than to Langston Hughes's and Richard Wright's proletarian literature, so popular in the Depression.

Henry James rhymed Fellowship with the gesture of biting a neglected apple, and Ovid a scarlet curtain with the skin of Atalanta.

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

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 . . .

In die laaste paar dekades van die negentiende eeu het Henry James begin met die skep van 'n soort sentrale intelligensie, dit wil sê, die verhaal word aangebied uit die bewussyn

Quite by chance, her talk of ghosts comes on the very day the book I am in the middle of reading has completely disappeared, only to be replaced by a novella by Henry James.

Still, my fascination with Buchanan did not abate, nor was I able, as the Seventies set in, to move the novel forward through the constant pastiche and basic fakery of any fiction not fed by the springs of memory -- what Henry James calls (in a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett) the fatal cheapness [and] mere escamotage of the 'historic' novel.

In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone.

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend: The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.