Top 500 Henry James Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “You’re like a picture; you ought to be enclosed in a gilt frame and stand against the wall.”

— Henry James

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 Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.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

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

— Henry James

404. “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

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

— Henry James

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Take things more easily. Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much – it will get out of tune, like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a rosebud. Live as you like best, and your character will form itself.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

411. “When Milly smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

413. “She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her.”

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

415. “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

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

— Henry James

417. “We must feel everything, everything we can. We are here for that.”

— Henry James

418. “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

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

— Henry James

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Henry James

424. “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

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

— Henry James

426. “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

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

— Henry James

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Henry James

431. “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

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

— Henry James

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Henry James

437. “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

438. “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

439. “You see, people forget you.”

— Henry James

440. “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

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

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

— 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. “I don’t understand you.”

— Henry James

447. “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

448. “I’ve thought of you perpetually, ever since I last saw you. I’m exactly the same. I love you just as much, and everything I said to you then is just as true.”

— 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. “She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine.”

— Henry James