1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Henry James

Henry James Quotes
page 3

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 quotes26 likes

Henry James Quotes

“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)

“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.

“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)

“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)

“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

“The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.”

Henry James

Letter to Henry James Sr. (26 October 1869).

“I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”

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. I.

“A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.”

Henry James

"Robert Louis Stevenson," Century Magazine (April 1888).

“Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

“The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn with crumpled playbills.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

“The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.”

Henry James

Criticism (1893).

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

Henry James

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

“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”

Henry James Roderick Hudson

Roderick Hudson.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.”

Henry James book Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. IV: Brook Farm and Concord.

“My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.”

Henry James

Notebook entry, Boston, (25 November 1881).

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”

Henry James

Letter to Hugh Walpole (21 August 1913).

“The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions… In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother… Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.”

Henry James

Criticism.

“…I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

“It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

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

“The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

Henry James book Theatricals

Theatricals: Second Series (1895).

“To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. […] You know that what you ask is impossible […] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: […].”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

XLIV
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

“The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.”

Henry James book The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse (1890), ch. IX.

“I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

“She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.”

Henry James book The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors, book VII, ch. I.

“The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"”

Henry James book The Altar of the Dead

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

“It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead.
Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXIV.

“[T]here are women who are for all your "times of life."”

Henry James book The Ambassadors

They're the most wonderful sort.
Book V, ch. III.
The Ambassadors (1903)

“Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

Henry James book The Awkward Age

Said by the Duchess in Book V, ch. XIX.
The Awkward Age (1899)

“I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”

Henry James book The Awkward Age

Said by Vanderbank in Book I, ch. II.
The Awkward Age (1899)

“In every disadvantage that a woman suffers at the hands of a man, there is inevitably, in what concerns the man, an element of cowardice. When I say "inevitably," I mean that this is what the woman sees in it.”

Henry James book Confidence

Source: Confidence (1879), Ch. XIX.

“Don't undervalue irony; it is often of great use.”

Henry James book Washington Square

Source: Washington Square (1881), Ch. XXVII.

“When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them.”

Henry James book The Ambassadors

Book VI, ch. III
The Ambassadors (1903)

“The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the Irish people at home who live in the different corners of a room and take boarders.”

Henry James Roderick Hudson

Source: Roderick Hudson (1875), Ch. V