Henry James

The fatal futility of Fact.

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation .

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

She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried—that was what it was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were.

In art economy is always beauty.

Vereker’s secret, my dear man—the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.

If I should certainly say to a novice, “Write from experience, and experience only,” I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.

[ Of Henry David Thoreau :] He was worse than provincial—he was parochial.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one’s ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room, and take boarders.

We stand like a race with shrunken muscles, staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted.

To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master .

I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection.

It's time to start living the life you've imagined.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion.

There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be all that need concern me.

She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault.

I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman.

It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed.

Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

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

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

If it is good to have one foot in England, it is still better, or at least as good, to have the other out of it.

I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your BELIEF will help create the fact.