Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”

— Henry James

452. “There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings.”

— Henry James

453. “SHE COULDN’T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm – or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The.”

— Henry James

454. “I don’t understand you.”

— Henry James

455. “She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners.”

— Henry James

456. “He said at another time that she had no heart; and he added in a moment that she had given it all away – in small pieces, like a frosted wedding-cake.”

— Henry James

457. “I’m taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.”

— Henry James

458. “Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.”

— Henry James

459. “I don’t know, upon my honour, what I’m doing.”

— Henry James

460. “His mind contained several millions of facts, packed too closely together for the light breeze of the imagination to draw through the mass.”

— Henry James

461. “But for a nice girl you do attract the most unnatural people.”

— Henry James

462. “Isabel, as she herself grew older, became acquainted with revulsions, with disgusts; there were days when the world looked black and she asked herself with some sharpness what it was that she was pretending to live for.”

— Henry James

463. “Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.”

— Henry James

464. “He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew there are disappointments that last as long as life.”

— Henry James

465. “You’ve not only dried up my tears; you’ve dried up my soul.”

— Henry James

466. “She was too young, too impatient to live, too unacquainted with pain.”

— Henry James

467. “I love you. It’s because I love you that I’m here.”

— Henry James

468. “Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.”

— Henry James

469. “It has been everything for me to see you.”

— Henry James

470. “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.”

— Henry James

471. “It’s her general air of being some one in particular that strikes me. Who is this rare creature, and what is she? Where did you find her, and how did you make her acquaintance?”

— Henry James

472. “The vice in the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate.”

— Henry James

473. “Oh, handsome – very, very,” I insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But infamous.” She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel – was infamous.” She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. “They were both infamous,” she finally said.”

— Henry James

474. “The days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was the taste of suspense.”

— Henry James

475. “It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

— Henry James

476. “Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it – to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality!”

— Henry James

477. “There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you!”

— Henry James

478. “It was in her disposition at all times to lose faith in the reality of absent things; she could summon back her faith, in case of need, with with an effort, but the effort was often painful even when the reality had been pleasant. The past was apt to look dead and its revival rather to show the livid light of a judgement-day.”

— Henry James

479. “Isabel,” he went on suddenly, “I wish it were over for you.” She answered nothing; she had burst into sobs; she remained so, with her buried face. He lay silent, listening to her sobs; at last he gave a long groan.”

— Henry James

480. “Ah, I must see Ralph!” Isabel wailed; not in resentment, not in the quick passion her companion had looked for; but in a tone of far-reaching, infinite sadness.”

— Henry James

481. “Deep in her soul – it was the deepest thing there – lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive.”

— Henry James

482. “But she had after all a better reason for coming to Rome than that she cared for it so little. Her friend easily recognized it, and with it the worth of the other’s fidelity. She had crossed the stormy ocean in midwinter because she had guessed that Isabel was sad.”

— Henry James

483. “Heaven deliver me from my friends!”

— Henry James

484. “You’re capable of anything, you and Osmond. I don’t mean Osmond by himself, and I don’t mean you by yourself. But together you’re dangerous – like some chemical combination.”

— Henry James

485. “I shall always think of you; I shall never think of anyone else. I came to England simply because you are here; I couldn’t stay at home after you had gone: I hated the country because you were not in it. If I like this country at present it is only because it holds you.”

— Henry James

486. “Yes, you’ve something to hide. It’s none of my business – very true. But I love you,” said Caspar Goodwood.”

— Henry James

487. “If you’re ever bored, take my advice and get married. Your wife, indeed, may bore you in that case, but you’ll never bore yourself.”

— Henry James

488. “Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don’t wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me.”

— Henry James

489. “She had not yet divested herself of a young faith that each new acquaintance would exert some momentous influence on her life.”

— Henry James

490. “There was a kind of violence in some of her impulses.”

— Henry James

491. “It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence.”

— Henry James

492. “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 rumor kept her imagination awake.”

— Henry James

493. “She was glad to pause, however, on the edge of this larger adventure; there was such a thrill even in the preliminary hovering.”

— Henry James

494. “She lost herself in infinite dismay when she thought of the magnitude of his deception.”

— Henry James

495. “There were complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together than they were anything else.”

— Henry James

496. “It’s as if he said to me: “I like you very much, but if it doesn’t please you I’ll never say it again.”

— Henry James

497. “I’m sure you’ve an excellent spirit; but don’t try to bear more things than you need.”

— Henry James

498. “It’s you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.”

— Henry James

499. “It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar.”

— Henry James

500. “Nothing could be happier, in general, than to seem dazzling, but she had a perverse unwillingness to glitter by arrangement.”

— Henry James