Quote

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.

Henry James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry James
Age: 73 †
Born: 1843
Born: January 1
Died: 1916
Died: January 1
Contributing Editor
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Henricus James
Kind
Complete
Chamber
Particle
Never
Kindness
Catching
Threads
Air
Imperfection
Tissues
Consciousness
Sensibility
Borne
Huge
Thread
Spider
Literature
Finest
Suspended
Experience
Immense
Spiders
Silken
Every
Limited
Particles
Tissue

More quotes by Henry James

Image
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
Henry James
Image
I have lived too long in foreign parts
Henry James
Image
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
Image
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
Image
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Henry James
Image
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
Image
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
Henry James
Image
You think too much.' 'I suppose I do but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
Henry James
Image
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
Henry James
Image
I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
Henry James
Image
It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
Henry James
Image
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
Image
I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
Henry James
Image
He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
Henry James
Image
Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
Image
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
Image
Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
Image
Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James