Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.”

— Henry James

352. “But it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always.”

— Henry James

353. “Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

355. “They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn’t been something else with it. It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.”

— Henry James

356. “These three words from her were in a flash like the glitter of a drawn blade, the jostle of the cup that my hand for weeks and weeks had held high and full to the brim and that now, even before speaking, I felt overflow in a deluge.”

— Henry James

357. “The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.”

— Henry James

358. “I didn’t refuse often enough.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Henry James

366. “You were reserved for my future.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

369. “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

370. “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

371. “Prettiness is terribly vulgar nowadays, and it is not every one that knows just the sort of ugliness that has chic.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Henry James

376. “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

377. “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

378. “Strether had never smoked, and he felt as if he flaunted at his friend that this had been only because of a reason. The reason, it now began to appear even to himself, was that he had never had a lady to smoke with.”

— Henry James

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Henry James

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

394. “But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

397. “You’re like a picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against the wall.”

— Henry James

398. “I would live for you still – if I could.” Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying. “But I can’t!” she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. She couldn’t indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

400. “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