To treat a “big” subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.
—Henry James
Topics: Theater
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
—Henry James
Topics: Thoughts
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
—Henry James
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing, Art
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
—Henry James
Topics: Exile
Until you try, you don’t know what you can’t do.
—Henry James
Topics: Trying
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
—Henry James
Topics: Reason
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
—Henry James
Topics: Museums
Money’s a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
—Henry James
Topics: Money
The only success worth one’s powder was success in the line of one’s idiosyncrasy … what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
—Henry James
Topics: Aptness, Success, Appropriateness
Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.
—Henry James
Topics: Mistakes
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
—Henry James
Topics: Civilization
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
—Henry James
Topics: Books, Literature, Writing
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
—Henry James
Topics: Simplicity
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications 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.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
A man who pretends to understand women is ad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
—Henry James
Topics: Understanding
I think I don’t regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth – I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.
—Henry James
Topics: Carpe-diem
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
—Henry James
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Don’t mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
—Henry James
Topics: Judges, Judging, Judgment, Mind
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?
—Henry James
Topics: Life, Happiness, Life and Living
The fatal futility of Fact.
—Henry James
Topics: Facts
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
He had dropped upon a seat halfway down the nave and, again in the museum mood, was trying with head thrown back and eyes aloft, to reconstitute a past, to reduce it in fact to the convenient terms of Victor Hugo, whom, a few days before, giving the rein for once in a way to the joy of life, he had purchased in seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with, he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the red-and-gold alone. He looked, doubtless, while he played his eternal nippers over Gothic glooms, sufficiently rapt in reverence; but what his thought had finally bumped against was the question of where, among packed accumulations, so multiform a wedge would be able to enter..
—Henry James
Topics: Reading
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
—Henry James
In art economy is always beauty.
—Henry James
Topics: Authors & Writing
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
—Henry James
Topics: Women, Men & Women, Men
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
—Henry James
Topics: Tradition
Deep experience is never peaceful.
—Henry James
Topics: Experience
They stood there knowing each other well and each on the whole willing to accept the satisfaction of knowing as a compensation for the inconvenience—whatever it might be—of being known.
—Henry James
Topics: Love
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
—Henry James
Topics: Reading, Books
Summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James
Topics: Summer, Seasons
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
- Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor British Politician
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Phyllis Bottome British Novelist
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Louis Leo Snyder American Historian
- Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
- Dodie Smith American Author
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- Arnold Bennett British Novelist
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