Henry James quotes - page 4

Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. (Henry James)
The terrible fluidity of self-revelation. View quote
Henry James
There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized. View quote
Henry James
The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. View quote
Henry James
The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism. View quote
Henry James
The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother... Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument. View quote
Henry James
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them. View quote
Henry James
The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his--attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. View quote
Henry James
It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other--for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended--the doors we had indiscreetly opened. View quote
Henry James
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see--that's my idea of happiness. View quote
Henry James
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded. (Henry James)
Of his own death So here it is at last, the distinguished thing. View quote
Henry James
Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours. View quote
Henry James
The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription. View quote
Henry James
... he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days. View quote
Henry James
It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be. View quote
Henry James
Her memory's your love. You want no other. View quote
Henry James
She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] [...]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself. View quote
Henry James
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be? View quote
Henry James
I still, in presence of life... have reactions - as many as possible... It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions - appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing - and I do. I believe I shall do yet again - it is still an act of life. View quote
Henry James
He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come. (Henry James)
I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them. View quote
Henry James
...I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm! View quote
Henry James
It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration-I can call it by no other name-was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul-held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length-had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead. View quote
Henry James
The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural. View quote
Henry James