Henry James quotes - page 6

Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost. (Henry James)
Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal. View quote
Henry James
... and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything. View quote
Henry James
I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James
.. her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it. View quote
Henry James
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James
Print it as it stands - beautifully. View quote
Henry James
The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian. View quote
Henry James
To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake. (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!" View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James
There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple - to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James
My choice is the old world - my choice, my need, my life. View quote
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. View quote
Henry James