Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “I was ready to know the very worst that was to be known.”

— Henry James

402. “When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.”

— Henry James

403. “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

404. “I like places in which things have happened – even if they’re sad things.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

408. “No evening I had passed at Bly had the portentous quality of this one; in spite of which – and in spite also of the deeper depths of consternation that had opened beneath my feet – there was literally, in the ebbing actual, an extraordinarily sweet sadness.”

— Henry James

409. “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

410. “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 Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.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

411. “And to ply them with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back.”

— Henry James

412. “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

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

— Henry James

414. “She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.”

— Henry James

415. “Do you know I sometimes think that I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”

— Henry James

416. “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

417. “The place suggested a convent with the modern improvements – an asylum in which privacy, though unbroken, might be not quite identical with privation, and meditation, though monotonous, might be of a cheerful cast.”

— Henry James

418. “People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”

— Henry James

419. “She has only one fault; too many ideas.”

— Henry James

420. “There’s no romance here but what you may have brought with you.”

— Henry James

Featured in: Romance Quotes

421. “I’ve been deceived too often; I’ve ceased to form attachments, to permit myself to feel attractions.”

— Henry James

422. “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;.”

— Henry James

423. “So far had Douglas presented his picture when someone put a question. “And what did the former governess die of? – of so much respectability?” Our friend’s answer was prompt. “That will come out. I don’t anticipate.”

— Henry James

424. “What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.”

— Henry James

425. “If she had troubles she must keep them to herself, and if life was difficult it would not make it easier to confess herself beaten.”

— Henry James

426. “When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.”

— Henry James

427. “Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.”

— Henry James

428. “She certainly had been a fact of rapid growth; but the world was wide, each day was more and more a new lesson. There.”

— Henry James

429. “I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.”

— Henry James

430. “He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.”

— Henry James

431. “She was afraid,′ said Mrs. Bread, very confidently; ’she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. That was the real trouble, sir. She was like a fair peach, I may say, with just one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature.”

— Henry James

432. “That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.”

— Henry James

433. “She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.”

— Henry James

434. “We please the people we don’t care for, we displease those we do!”

— Henry James

435. “He reconstructed a possible groping Chad of three or four years before, a Chad who had, after all, simply – for that was the only way to see it – been too vulgar for his privilege. Surely it was a privilege to have been young and happy just there. Well, the best thing Strether knew of him was that he had had such a dream.”

— Henry James

436. “He’s the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn’t know what to believe in.”

— Henry James

437. “And the figure of the income he had arrived at had never been high enough to look any one in the face.”

— Henry James

438. “I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience – or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.”

— Henry James

439. “I love you. It’s because I love you that I’m here.”

— Henry James

440. “I’ve struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.”

— Henry James

441. “Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates.”

— Henry James

442. “Oh we’re not loved. We’re not even hated. We’re only just sweetly ignored.”

— Henry James

443. “The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.”

— Henry James

444. “They might in short have represented any mystery they would; the point being predominantly that the key to the mystery, the key that could wind and unwind it without a snap of the spring, was there in her pocket – or rather, no doubt, clasped at this crisis in her hand and pressed, as she walked back and forth, to her breast. She.”

— Henry James

445. “SHE COULDN’T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm – or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The.”

— Henry James

446. “You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”

— Henry James

447. “There may be unselfish natures, there may be disinterested feelings.”

— Henry James

448. “The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It.”

— Henry James

449. “They haven’t been good – they’ve only been absent. It has been easy to live with them because they’re simply leading a life of their own.”

— Henry James

450. “How on the other hand could I make a reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?”

— Henry James