Henry James citations

Page 2

“If this was love, love had been overrated.”

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

“Things are always different than what they might be… If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”

“Don't pass it by--the immediate, the real, the only, the yours.”

“… and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

“True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.”

“Excellence does not require perfection.”

“When I am wicked I am in high spirits.”

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

“You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!”

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”

“Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”

“To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived — to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that — this doubtless is the right way to live.”

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

“Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live”

“Deep experience is never peaceful.”

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

“She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.”

“The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.”

“… he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.”

“Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.”

“It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.”

“I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.”

“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”

“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.”

“She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.”

“.. her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.”