Henry James quotes - page 6

Henry James was an American-British author, renowned for his novels, short stories, and literary criticism. His works often explore themes of consciousness, perception, and the contrasts between the Old World and the New. He influenced the development of modern fiction and remains celebrated for his psychological depth and narrative technique. Here are 194 of his quotes:

Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.

Henry James

... and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

Henry James

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

Henry James

Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

Henry James

.. her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

Henry James

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

Henry James

She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.

Henry James

Print it as it stands - beautifully.

Henry James

The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.

Henry James

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it - this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"

Henry James

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

Henry James

He would agree that life is a little worth living - or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.

Henry James

I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

Henry James

She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.

Henry James

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.

Henry James

There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.

Henry James

Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.

Henry James

She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.

Henry James

With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him-it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Henry James

Here at present I felt afresh-for I had felt it again and again-how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.

Henry James

My choice is the old world - my choice, my need, my life.

Henry James

To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.

Henry James