Henry James: Trending quotes (page 5)

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“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”

Henry James

"Venice," The Century Magazine, vol. XXV (November 1882), reprinted in Portraits of Places (1883) and later in Italian Hours http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8ihou10.txt (1909), ch. I: Venice, pt. II.

“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.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Imagination , Past , Sea

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

Henry James

"Anthony Trollope," Century Magazine (July 1883); reprinted in Partial Portraits (1888).

Imagination , Literature

“Ideas are, in truth, force.”

Henry James

"Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history." — Henry James (1879-1947), Charles W. Eliot (1930), 2 vol. This namesake was James' nephew, the son of William James. His life of Eliot earned him the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Misattributed

Truth , Idea

“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination… To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.”

Henry James

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (16 January 1871).

Secret , Imagination , Nature , Country

“There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

Henry James

After suffering a stroke (1915-12-02), the first of several which led to his death, as recounted by Edith Wharton in A Backward Glance (1934), ch. 14: "He is said to have told his old friend Lady Prothero, when she saw him after the first stroke, that in the very act of falling (he was dressing at the time) he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: 'So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!'".

“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.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Way , Housing , Personality

“In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.”

Henry James

"Essays in Criticism by Matthew Arnold," North American Review (July 1865).

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.”

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life , Pain , Help , Hurt

“One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. II: Early Manhood.

Life , Country

“People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.”

Henry James

Said by Mrs. Brookenham in The Awkward Age http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/akage10.txt (1899), book VI, ch. III.

People

“He would agree that life is a little worth living — or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. V: The Three American Novels.

Life

“Life's too short for chess.”

Henry James

Henry James Byron, Our Boys (1875), Act I
Misattributed

Life

“She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] […]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Question , Housing , Personality

“I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXIV.

“The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself distinction, and what was talent but the art of being completely whatever it was that one happened to be?”

Henry James book The Next Time

"The Next Time," The Yellow Book, vol. VI (July 1895).

Art , Success

“She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Friendship

“Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.”

Henry James

The Figure in the Carpet http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/fgcpt10h.htm (1896).

Secret , Books

“There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.”

Henry James

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