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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

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
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
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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.
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Excellence does not require perfection.
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
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Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
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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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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
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Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
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