Henry James Quotes

His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.

It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

She gazed and wondered, like a child or peasant, and paid her silent tribute to visible grandeur.

Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.

Things are always different from what they might be.

She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticize would be a peculiarly discreditable act.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

The real offense, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all.

You young men have too many jokes. When there are no jokes you've nothing left.

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.

Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.

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.

"It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside...".

I’ll watch with you.