Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “She believed me, I was sure, absolutely; if she hadn’t I don’t know what would have become of me, for I couldn’t have borne the strain alone.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

253. “What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense – it was superseded by horrible proofs.”

— Henry James

254. “I was dazzled by their loveliness.”

— Henry James

255. “It must be added however that, thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.”

— Henry James

256. “An Englishman’s never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.”

— Henry James

257. “There came suddenly an hour after which, as I look back, the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering.”

— Henry James

258. “What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child’s part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.”

— Henry James

259. “He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”

— Henry James

260. “She had an unequalled gift, usually pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into opportunities.”

— Henry James

261. “I keep a band of music in my ante-room,” he said once to her. “It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on within.”

— Henry James

262. “THEY have the manners to be silent, and you, trusted as you are, the baseness to speak!”

— Henry James

263. “One never said the things one wanted – one remembered them all an hour afterwards. On the other hand one usually said a lot of things one shouldn’t, simply from a sense that one had to say something.”

— Henry James

264. “I welcomed the consciousness that I was charged with much to do, and I caused it to be known as well that, left thus to myself, I was quite remarkably firm.”

— Henry James

265. “When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

— Henry James

266. “He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

268. “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

269. “He had seen the follies of the romantic disposition, but there seemed somehow no follies in theirs – nothing, one was obliged to recognise, but innocent pleasures, pleasures without penalties.”

— Henry James

270. “She had always observed that she got on better with clever women than silly ones like herself; the silly ones could never understand her wisdom; whereas the clever ones – the really clever ones – always understood her silliness.”

— Henry James

271. “It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.”

— Henry James

272. “Things are always different from what they might be.”

— Henry James

273. “He would rather seem stupid any day than fatuous.”

— Henry James

274. “I find that I really hang back; but I must take my horrid plunge.”

— Henry James

275. “Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.”

— Henry James

276. “But James, as an artist, was deeply suspicious of what gave him pleasure, or indeed satisfaction. In his own complex sensibility, there was an ambiguity about most things, and this moved him towards subtlety when he approached character, drama, and scene, and nudged him towards many modifying subclauses when he wrote a sentence. Nothing came to him simply.”

— Henry James

277. “Oh, it was a trap – not designed but deep – to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.”

— Henry James

278. “You see, people forget you.”

— Henry James

279. “He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.”

— Henry James

280. “The young girl inspected her flounces and smoothed her ribbons again; and Winterbourne presently risked an observation upon the beauty of the view. He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not in the least embarrassed herself.”

— Henry James

281. “One is oneself a fine consequence.”

— Henry James

282. “When you forget to eat, you know you’re alive.”

— Henry James

283. “If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.”

— Henry James

284. “They had built strong and piled high – based as it was on such appearances – their conviction that, thanks to her native complacencies of so many sorts, she would always, quite to the end and through and through, take them as nobly sparing her. Amerigo.”

— Henry James

285. “It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.”

— Henry James

286. “People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!”

— Henry James

287. “In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.”

— Henry James

288. “Art is long. If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

— Henry James

289. “Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.”

— Henry James

290. “I never was what I should be.”

— Henry James

291. “Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.”

— Henry James

292. “The day lingered and the last calls of the last birds sounded, in a flushed sky, from the old trees.”

— Henry James

293. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have.”

— Henry James

294. “The infirmity of art was the candour of affection, the grossness of pedigree the refinement of sympathy; the ugliest object in fact as a general thing were the bravest, the tenderest mementoes, and, as such, figured in glass cases apart, worthy doubtless of the home but not worthy of the temple – dedicated to the grimacing, not to the clear-faced gods. She.”

— Henry James

295. “I’ll piously gather up the crumbs of your feasts and make a meal of them,” said Nora. “I’ll let you know how they taste.”

— Henry James

296. “The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.”

— Henry James

297. “I don’t know why – there are no brick gables,′ said Mrs. Prest, ’but this corner has seemed to me before more Dutch than Italian, more like Amsterdam than Venice. It’s perversely clean, for reasons of its own; and though you can pass on foot scarcely anyone ever thinks of doing so. It has the air of a Protestant Sunday. Perhaps the people are afraid of the Misses Bordereau. I daresay they have the reputation of witches.”

— Henry James

298. “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

299. “Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being ‘bad’ is a question for the metaphysicians.”

— Henry James

300. “The women one meets – what are they but books one has already read? You’re a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I’ve a subscription.”

— Henry James