Henry James citations (155 citations, Page 4)

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).

“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.”

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Henry James

Letter to Henry Adams (21 March 1914).

“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.”

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Henry James livre 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.”

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Henry James livre The Turn of the Screw

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

“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.”

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Henry James livre The Portrait of a Lady

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

“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.”

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Henry James livre The Turn of the Screw

Introduction.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)

“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.”

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Henry James livre Washington Square

Washington Square (1881), ch. XIV.

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

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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)

“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.”

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Henry James livre What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“In art economy is always beauty.”

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Henry James livre 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.”

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Henry James livre The Portrait of a Lady

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

“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?”

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Henry James

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

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

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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)