Henry James Quotes

She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone.

...the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object.

And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.

Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. [...] But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. [...] It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.

To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.

A second chance — that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Everything had something behind it: life was like a long corridor with rows of closed doors.

...there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other...

Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.