Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.”

— Henry James

352. “When I tell you I love you it’s simply what I came for. I thought it was for something else; but it was for that. I shouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe I should never see you again. It’s the last time – let me pluck a single flower! I’ve no right to say that, I know; and you’ve no right to listen. But you don’t listen; you never listen, you’re always thinking of something else.”

— Henry James

353. “This impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her companion’s inveteracy of never passing first, of not sitting till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to give leave, of not forgetting too familiarly that in addition to being important she was also sensitive, had the effect of throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of decorum. It.”

— Henry James

354. “What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness. It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light.”

— Henry James

355. “Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some.”

— Henry James

356. “Basil Ransom had got up just as Mrs. Luna made this last declaration; for a young lady had glided into the room, who stopped short as it fell upon her ears. She stood there looking, consciously and rather seriously, at Mr. Ransom; a smile of exceeding faintness played about her lips – it was just perceptible enough to light up the native gravity of her face. It might have been likened to a thin ray of moonlight resting upon the wall of a prison.”

— Henry James

357. “Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...”

— Henry James

358. “It was the hushed daybreak of the Roman revelation in particular that he could usually best recover – the way that there above all, where the princes and popes had been before him, his divination of his faculty had gone to his head. He.”

— Henry James

359. “Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element- direct observation.”

— Henry James

360. “Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. ‘My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.’ ‘Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!’ said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: ‘Don’t tell me that – in this for instance – there are not abysses. I want abysses.”

— Henry James

361. “I don’t see what harm there is in my wishing not to tie myself. I don’t want to begin life by marrying. There are other things a woman can do.”

— Henry James

362. “The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The.”

— Henry James

363. “He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being.”

— Henry James

364. “The old-world quality in everything that she now saw had all the charm of strangeness.”

— Henry James

365. “She had none the less extracted from her a vow in respect to the time that if the Colonel might be depended on they would spend at Fawns; and nothing came home to her more in this connexion or inspired her with a more intimate interest than her sense of absolutely seeing her interlocutress forbear to observe that Charlotte’s view of a long visit even from such allies was there to be reckoned with.”

— Henry James

366. “What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for one’s self?”

— Henry James

367. “The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one’s will and one’s inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one’s organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.”

— Henry James

368. “He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course – him too a modest retreat awaited.”

— Henry James

369. “His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.”

— Henry James

370. “She saw herself in this connexion without detachment – saw others alone with intensity; otherwise she might have been struck, fairly have been amused, by her free assignment of the pachydermatous quality. If.”

— Henry James

371. “I don’t approve of myself in the least. Sometimes it comes over me – how I should object to myself if I were not myself.”

— Henry James

372. “I ought to tell you I’m probably your cousin.”

— Henry James

373. “You were reserved for my future.”

— Henry James

374. “And she really had tones to make justice weep.”

— Henry James

375. “I don’t talk for your amusement.”

— Henry James

376. “It’s exactly the thing that I’m reduced to doing for myself. It seems to rescue a little, you see, from the wreck of hopes and ambitions, the refuse-heap of disappointments and failures, my one presentable little scrap of an identity.”

— Henry James

377. “She sometimes felt a sort of passion of tenderness for memories which had led no other merit than that they belonged to her unmarried life.”

— Henry James

378. “The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was in having a mind of her own at all.”

— Henry James

379. “What’s a man,’ she pursued, ’especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?”

— Henry James

380. “When you are successful you naturally feel more at home.”

— Henry James

381. “He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.”

— Henry James

382. “Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common – having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.”

— Henry James

383. “I want to bring them down, – down, down, down! I want to turn the tables upon them – I want to mortify them as they mortified me. They took me up into a high place and made me stand there for all the world to see me, and then they stole behind me and pushed me into this bottomless pit, where I lie howling and gnashing my teeth! I made a fool of myself before all their friends; but I shall make something worse of them.”

— Henry James

384. “It was the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else.”

— Henry James

385. “There is always a place for chance in things.”

— Henry James

386. “He put into his one little glass everything he raised to his lips, and it was as if he had always carried in his pocket, like a tool of his trade, this receptacle, a little glass cut with a fineness of which the art had long since been lost, and kept in an old morocco case stamped in uneffaceable gilt with the arms of a deposed dynasty.”

— Henry James

387. “The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who.”

— Henry James

388. “Her desire to think well of herself had at least the element of humility that it always needed to be supported by proof.”

— Henry James

389. “His very quietness was part of it now, as always part of everything, of his success, his originality, his modesty, his exquisite public perversity, his inscrutable incalculable energy; and this quality perhaps it might be – all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable traceable effort – that placed him in her eyes as no precious work of art probably had ever been placed in his own.”

— Henry James

390. “You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said ‘Why not?’ to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto.”

— Henry James

391. “They had from an early hour made up their mind that society was, luckily, unintelligent, and the margin allowed them by this had fairly become one of their commonplaces.”

— Henry James

392. “Our relation, all round, exists – it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it.”

— Henry James

393. “It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.” She.”

— Henry James

394. “Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.’ ‘They would uncommonly suit you,’ he frankly returned. ‘Oh yes, I see myself!”

— Henry James

395. “This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They.”

— Henry James

396. “I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known.”

— Henry James

397. “What young man had ever paraded about that way, without a reason, a maiden in her flower? And.”

— Henry James

398. “Spiritual age is determined by the acts which make the mornings and evenings of the soul, and not by the motions of the physical globe. The soul should have its own cycles and revolutions, presenting in turn every portion of its existence to the vivifying influence of the great source of light.”

— Henry James

399. “In American, the gentlemen obey the ladies.”

— Henry James

400. “No,’ she sadly insisted – ’men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.”

— Henry James