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

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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
Particles
Tissue
Every
Limited
Chamber
Particle
Kind
Complete
Catching
Threads
Never
Kindness
Imperfection
Tissues
Air
Sensibility
Borne
Consciousness
Spider
Huge
Thread
Suspended
Literature
Finest
Spiders
Silken
Experience
Immense

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Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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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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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.
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
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Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
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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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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
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