Henry James

"True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one's self but the point is not only to get out you must stay out and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."

"Deep experience is never peaceful."

"We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it."

"We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie."

"Nothing is my last word on anything."

"Are you using me simply as a vulgar tool? Don't you care for me the least little bit? Let me suggest that for a girl in your-your ambiguous position, you are too proud, by several shades. Don't go back to Roger in a hurry! You're not the unspotted maiden you were but two short days ago. Who am I, what am I, to the people whose opinion you care for? A very low fellow, madam; and yet with me you've gone far to cast your lot. If you're not prepared to do more, you should have done less. Nora, Nora," he went on, breaking into a vein none the less revolting for being more ardent, "I confess I don't understand you! But the more you puzzle me the more you fascinate me; and the less you like me the more I love you. What has there been between you and Lawrence? Hang me if I can understand! Are you an angel of purity, or are you the most audacious of flirts?"

"New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire."

"It's time to start living the life you've imagined."

"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 favour of doing it."

"It was grey windless weather, and the bell of the little old church that nestled in the hollow of the Sussex down sounded near and domestic. We were a straggling procession in the mild damp air - which, as always at that season, gave one the feeling that after the trees were bare there was more of it, a larger sky...("Sir Edmund Orme")"

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."

"I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong."

"I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which came an air of a keenness I had never breathed and of a taste stronger than wine. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all likelihood see it familiarly, as I might say, again. I was on the lookout for it as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light and ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to answer for it to all and sundry that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was commonly supposed. There's no doubt that I was much uplifted. I couldn't get over the distinction conferred on me, the exception - in the way of mystic enlargement of vision - made in my favour.("Sir Edmund Orme")"

"Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions."

"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."

"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."

"It has not been a successful life.''No -- it has only been a beautiful one."

"I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it."

"She was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed towards conversation."

"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."