"I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse."
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Quote collection
Henry James quotes (page 8 of 13)
251 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All intimacies are based on differences."
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"The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind."
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"If you haven't had your life what have you had?"
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"...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood."
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"My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe." Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady."
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"I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper."
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"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."
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"One is oneself a fine consequence."
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"...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything."
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"Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way."
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"If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it."
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"Don't try so much to form your character - it's like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself."
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"I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected."
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"There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding."
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"All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life."
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"Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better."
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"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."
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"If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'"
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"Art without life is a poor affair."
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