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Henry James Quotes
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Henry James, OM was an American author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

He is best known for a number of novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between emigre Americans, English people, and continental Europeans – examples of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. His later works were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often made use of a personal style in which ambiguous or contradictory motivations and impressions were overlaid or closely juxtaposed in the discussion of a single character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting.

In addition to voluminous works of fiction, James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man and eventually settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

✵ 15. April 1843 – 28. February 1916
Henry James photo
Henry James: 154   quotes 26   likes

Henry James Quotes

“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

Pain , Time , Parting

“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

People

“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.”

Henry James

The New Novel (1914).

Life , Education , Imagination , Parting

“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

Disease , Sense , Suffering

“Print it as it stands — beautifully.”

Henry James

The Death of the Lion http://books.google.com/books?id=tLE_AAAAYAAJ&q="Print+it+as+it+stands+beautifully"&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)

Color , Business , Reality , Effort

“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)

Life , Dogs , Art , Search

“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!”

Henry James

The Madonna of the Future http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2460/2460-h/2460-h.htm (1879)
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

Life , Cats

“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!"”

Henry James

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

Life , People , Education , Way

“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.”

Henry James

Flaubert (1893).

World

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

Henry James

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (4 February 1872).

Fate , Fight

“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)

“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)