Henry James: Trending quotes (page 6)

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“The fatal futility of Fact.”

Henry James book The Spoils of Poynton

The Spoils of Poynton.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.”

Henry James

Said to Hamlin Garland in 1906 and quoted by Garland in Roadside Meetings (1930; reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-417-90788-6, ch. XXXVI: Henry James at Rye (p. 461).

Life

“I still, in presence of life… have reactions — as many as possible… It's, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions — appearances, memories, many things, go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing — and I do. I believe I shall do yet again — it is still an act of life.”

Henry James

Letter to Henry Adams (21 March 1914).

Life , Appearance , Memory

“It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

“He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

Beauty , Way , Idea , Light

“Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Love , Understanding , Nature , Thinking

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Introduction.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Christmas , Housing

“Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.”

Henry James book Washington Square

Washington Square (1881), ch. XIV.

Women , Men , People

“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”

Henry James

Variant text: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.
The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

Life

“To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.”

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“In art economy is always beauty.”

Henry James book The Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Beauty , Art

“She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

Men , Water

“If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?”

Henry James

"The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt," Fortnightly Review (October 1888).

Effort

“There are bad manners everywhere, but an aristocracy is bad manners organized.”

Henry James

The Point of View HTTP://BOOKS.GOOGLE.COM/books?id=FrQRAAAAYAAJ&q=%22there+are+bad+manners+everywhere+but+an+aristocracy+is+bad+manners+organized%22&pg=PA289#v=onepage (1882)

“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.”

Henry James

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

“We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.”

Henry James book The Aspern Papers

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

Feeling , Past

“I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

World , Heart

“The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant — no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

Henry James

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

Effort , Success

“We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnée; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple — to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.”

Henry James

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

Art , Exercises , Idea , Failure

“With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

Feeling , Imagination , Passion , Loss