Henry James Quotes

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline - there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less.

"Yes, that's the bore of comfort," said Lord Warburton. "We only know when we're uncomfortable."

[of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones] [it is] like a vast episode in a sermon preached by a grandly humorous divine; and however we may be entertained by the way, we must not forget that our ultimate duty is to be instructed.

Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?[…] What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.[…] The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.[…] Live!

It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.

"You must come to Lockleigh again," said Miss Molyneux, very sweetly, to Isabel, ignoring this remark of Isabel's friend. Isabel looked into her quiet eyes a moment, and for that moment seemed to see in their grey depths the reflexion of everything she had rejected in rejecting Lord Warburton — the peace, the kindness, the honour, the possessions, a deep security and a great exclusion. She kissed Miss Molyneux and then she said: "I'm afraid I can never come again."

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

if you are going to be pushed you had better jump

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.

The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.