Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”

— Henry James

52. “How can I retrace to-day the strange steps of my obsession?”

— Henry James

53. “Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.”

— Henry James

54. “True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the point is not only to get out – you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.”

— Henry James

55. “Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.”

— Henry James

56. “Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.”

— Henry James

57. “He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.”

— Henry James

58. “I have lived too long in foreign parts.”

— Henry James

59. “When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.”

— Henry James

60. “He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference.”

— Henry James

61. “Keep making the movements of life.”

— Henry James

62. “I think patriotism is like charity – it begins at home.”

— Henry James

63. “Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.”

— Henry James

64. “I was a screen – I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would.”

— Henry James

65. “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”

— Henry James

66. “He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.”

— Henry James

67. “The “germ,” wherever gathered, has ever been for me, “the germ of a story,” and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.”

— Henry James

68. “Life is all a green old English garden and time an endless summer afternoon.”

— Henry James

69. “It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.”

— Henry James

70. “His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.”

— Henry James

71. “She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!”

— Henry James

72. “And remember this, that if you’ve been hated, you’ve also been loved.”

— Henry James

73. “Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”

— Henry James

74. “He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him.”

— Henry James

75. “You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.”

— Henry James

76. “A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”

— Henry James

77. “To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.”

— Henry James

78. “Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

— Henry James

79. “The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.”

— Henry James

80. “I might show it to you, but you’d never see it. The privilege isn’t given to every one; it’s not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.”

— Henry James

81. “In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That is not the deepest thing; there is something deeper.”

— Henry James

82. “Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.”

— Henry James

83. “Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.”

— Henry James

84. “I recall my fleeting instants in Savannah as the taste of a cup charged to the brim.”

— Henry James

85. “The fatal futility of Fact.”

— Henry James

86. “We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”

— Henry James

87. “New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.”

— Henry James

88. “Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

— Henry James

89. “Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

— Henry James

90. “If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.”

— Henry James

91. “The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

— Henry James

92. “Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic; it was supposed to engender difficult questions and to keep the conversation at a low temperature.”

— Henry James

93. “I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.”

— Henry James

94. “London is on the whole the most possible form of life.”

— Henry James

95. “To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.”

— Henry James

96. “Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.”

— Henry James

97. “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”

— Henry James

98. “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

99. “I take up my own pen again – the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself – today – I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”

— Henry James

100. “Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”

— Henry James