His secretary of many years’ standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.

— Henry James

Henry James Quotes

I don’t know what great unhappiness might bring me to; but it seems to me I shall always be ashamed.

— Henry James

It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared.

— Henry James

It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason.

— Henry James

I shall always think of you; I shall never think of anyone else. I came to England simply because you are here; I couldn’t stay at home after you had gone: I hated the country because you were not in it. If I like this country at present it is only because it holds you.

— Henry James

The English are the most romantic people in the world.

— Henry James

But my impression dates from the very first hour we met. I lost no time, I fell in love with you then. It was at first sight, as the novels say; I know now that’s not a fancy-phrase, and I shall think better of novels for evermore.

— Henry James

He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell her.

— Henry James

I don’t go off easily, but when I’m touched, it’s for life. It’s for life, Miss Archer, it’s for life.

— Henry James

The past came back to her in one of those rushing waves of emotion by which persons of sensibility are visited at odd hours.

— Henry James

But I think on the whole I would rather be myself than you. I’m quite content to be myself; I don’t want to change.

— Henry James

I know how you suffer, and that’s why I’m here.

— Henry James

I can’t escape unhappiness.

— Henry James

She believed just then that to let him take her in his arms would be the next thing to her dying. This belief, for a moment, was a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink.

— Henry James

The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.

— Henry James

Ah, be mine as I’m yours!

— Henry James

It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence.

— Henry James

They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously, to each other.

— Henry James

I don’t care who you may be – I don’t want to know; it signifies very little to-day.

— Henry James

It’s very easy to laugh at her but it is not easy to be as brave as she.

— Henry James

She does everything beautifully. She’s complete.

— Henry James
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