Henry James Quotes page 2

“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.”

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

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

Flaubert (1893).

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

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (4 February 1872).

“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.”

"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.

“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.”

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

“Ideas are, in truth, force.”

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

“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.”

"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

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

Letter to Charles Eliot Norton (16 January 1871).

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

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

“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.”

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!'".

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

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

“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.”

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

Henry James book What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“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.

“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.”

“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.”

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

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. V: The Three American Novels.

“Life's too short for chess.”

“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 Byron, Our Boys (1875), Act I
Misattributed

“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?”

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

“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?”

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

Henry James book The Next Time

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“The fatal futility of Fact.”

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

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.”

“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.”

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).

“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.”

Letter to Henry Adams (21 March 1914).

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Introduction.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Henry James book Washington Square

Washington Square (1881), ch. XIV.

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

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

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)

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

“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?”

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

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

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

“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.”

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)