“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.

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Henry James154
American novelist, short story author, and literary critic 1843–1916

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