Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly – last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.”

— Henry James

202. “Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we’ll wake up to find our work done because we’ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!”

— Henry James

203. “Was he in love with Gilbert Osmond’s wife, and if so what comfort did he expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own was this the service her husband had asked of her?”

— Henry James

204. “Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.”

— Henry James

205. “She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.”

— Henry James

206. “Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.”

— Henry James

207. “One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

— Henry James

208. “Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.”

— Henry James

Featured in: Country Quotes

209. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

210. “There are no themes so human as those that reflect the closeness of bliss to bale.”

— Henry James

211. “The image of the “presence,” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go – this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short – he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.”

— Henry James

212. “The misery of Venice stands there for all the world to see; it is part of the spectacle – a thoroughgoing devotee of local colour might consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The.”

— Henry James

213. “If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?”

— Henry James

214. “What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?”

— Henry James

215. “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it.”

— Henry James

216. “I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies – in great towns and great crowds. It’s a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge “squash”, as we elegantly call it – an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”

— Henry James

217. “England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.”

— Henry James

218. “Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she should produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was.”

— Henry James

219. “Of course you’re always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you’ll condemn them all!”

— Henry James

220. “She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.”

— Henry James

221. “She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed... And she was dead, dead, dead.”

— Henry James

222. “The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.”

— Henry James

223. “Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace.”

— Henry James

224. “Writing is not primarily escape, but use.”

— Henry James

225. “It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a moment in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry.”

— Henry James

226. “All intimacies are based on differences.”

— Henry James

227. “I don’t need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.”

— Henry James

Featured in: Romance Quotes

228. “In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.”

— Henry James

229. “The church was simply the former chapel of the castle, fronting upon its grass-grown court, which, however, was of generous enough width to have given up its quaintest corner to a little graveyard. Here the very headstones themselves seemed to sleep, as they slanted into the grass.”

— Henry James

230. “His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being ‘fine’.”

— Henry James

231. “However British you may be, I am more British still.”

— Henry James

232. “Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn’t come; but perhaps – as they would seemingly here be things quite other – this long ache might at last drop to rest.”

— Henry James

233. “Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things.”

— Henry James

234. “The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business, in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.”

— Henry James

235. “To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.”

— Henry James

236. “To live only to suffer – only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged – it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn’t all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn’t it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?”

— Henry James

237. “It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The.”

— Henry James

238. “I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.”

— Henry James

239. “His secretary of many years’ standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.”

— Henry James

240. “Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation – a meagre entertainment for a young man who felt that he might have been an excellent linguist. He.”

— Henry James

241. “It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness – that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.”

— Henry James

242. “But I was to be later on so much more overwhelmed that this mere dawn of alarm was a comparatively human chill.”

— Henry James

243. “It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and of one’s time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.”

— Henry James

244. “Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast – so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech.”

— Henry James

245. “It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other – for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended – the doors we had indiscreetly opened.”

— Henry James

246. “I was dazzled by their loveliness.”

— Henry James

247. “Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?”

— Henry James

248. “Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

— Henry James

249. “But if we may perish by cracks in things that we don’t know.”

— Henry James

250. “May Bartram smiled. “I don’t pretend it exactly shows that I’m not living for you. It’s my intimacy with you that’s in question.” He laughed as he saw what she meant. “Yes, but since, as you say, I’m only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you’re – aren’t you? no more than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if I am, as I understand you, you’re not compromised. Is that it?”

— Henry James