Henry James: Trending quotes

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Henry James: 308 quotes26 likes

“It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. VI: England and Italy.

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

“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.”

Henry James book The Middle Years

Source: The Middle Years

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”

Henry James book The Wings of the Dove

Source: The Wings of the Dove

“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw

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

Henry James book The Ambassadors

Source: The Ambassadors

“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

Henry James Roderick Hudson

Source: Roderick Hudson

“The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.”

The New Novel (1914).

“The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”

Henry James book The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XLI

“Print it as it stands — beautifully.”

The Death of the Lion http://books.google.com/books?id=tLE_AAAAYAAJ&q=&quot;Print+it+as+it+stands+beautifully&quot;&pg=PA63#v=onepage (1894).

“The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.”

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.”

Henry James book The Aspern Papers

The Aspern Papers; The Turn of the Screw; The Liar; The Two Faces.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.”

Henry James book The Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.”

Henry James book The Middle Years

The Middle Years (1917), ch. VI.

“Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!”

The Madonna of the Future http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2460/2460-h/2460-h.htm (1879) <br class="br">The Atlantic Monthly, March 1873 http://books.google.com/books?id=T4cGAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Cats+and+monkeys+monkeys+and+cats+all+human+life+is+there%22&pg=PA293#v=onepage

“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. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"”

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.”

Flaubert (1893).

“It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (4 February 1872).