Quote

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

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
Responsibilities
Complexes
Complex
Fate
Europe
Responsibility
Valuation
Fighting
Entails
American
Superstitious

More quotes by Henry James

Image
The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
Henry James
Image
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
Image
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
Image
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. So as to do them? asked her aunt. So as to choose. said Isabel
Henry James
Image
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
Henry James
Image
Things are always different from what they might be.
Henry James
Image
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
Henry James
Image
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
Image
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
Image
Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
Image
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
Image
No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
Henry James
Image
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
Image
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
Image
She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
Henry James
Image
Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.
Henry James