Quotes from book
The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan's Magazine in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James's most popular long novels and is regarded by critics as one of his finest.

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“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!”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

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“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady

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“She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“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.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“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.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“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 book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“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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“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.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

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

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“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.

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“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)

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“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

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“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)

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“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.

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“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

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“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)

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“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.