Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon – the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn’t come; but perhaps – as they would seemingly here be things quite other – this long ache might at last drop to rest.

— Henry James

Henry James Quotes

It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?

— Henry James

Ah, things are always different from what they might be,” said the old man. “If you wait for them to change you’ll never do anything.

— Henry James

Deep in her soul – it was the deepest thing there – lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive.

— Henry James

She thought him very handsome as he said this, but reflected that unfortunately men didn’t care for the truth, especially the new kinds, in proportion as they were good-looking. She had, however, a moral resource that should always fall back upon; it had already been a comfort to her, on occasions of acute feeling, that she hated men, as a class anyway.

— Henry James

He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words – “Do YOU?” – more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain.

— Henry James

The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance – all strewn with crumpled playbills.

— Henry James

She kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated maneuvers, at the word of command. Just now she had given it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of “German Thought.

— Henry James

There were exactly states of the air, conditions of sound and of stillness, unspeakable impressions of the KIND of ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the feeling of the medium in which, that June evening out of doors, I had had my first sight of Quint, and in which, too, at those other instants, I had, after seeing him through the window, looked for him in vain in the circle of shrubbery.

— Henry James

Her nature had, in her conceit, a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s spirit was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.

— Henry James

Of course you mean that I’m meddling in what doesn’t concern me. But why shouldn’t I speak to you of this matter without annoying you or embarrassing myself? What’s the use of being your cousin if I can’t have a few privileges? What’s the use of adoring you without hope of a reward if I can’t have a few compensations? What’s the use of being ill and disabled and restricted to mere spectatorship at the game of life if I really can’t see the show when I’ve paid so much for my ticket?

— Henry James

Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all. I don’t wish to be a mere sheep in the flock; I wish to choose my fate and know something of human affairs beyond what other people think it compatible with propriety to tell me.

— Henry James

Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it – to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality!

— Henry James

Wasn’t that what women always said they wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they couldn’t more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn’t make husbands.

— Henry James

At present, with her sense that the note of change had been struck, came gradually a host of images of the things she was leaving behind her.

— Henry James

I don’t care how I live, nor where I live,” said Millicent, “so long as I can do as I like.

— Henry James

She seemed to him, in all this, an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity.

— Henry James

For Isabel, however, there was of course as of yet no thought of getting out, but only of advancing.

— Henry James

I’m rather ashamed of my plans; I make a new one every day.

— Henry James

You could criticise any marriage; it was the essence of a marriage to be criticism.

— Henry James

Women find their religion sometimes in strange exercises.

— Henry James
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