It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
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.
It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you’re nice to the second housemaid.
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
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.
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we’ll wake up to find our work done because we’ve lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!
If you have work to do, don’t wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.
Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete.
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
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.