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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

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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
Asked
Choose
Always
Things
Isabel
Aunt
Shouldn

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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.
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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.
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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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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Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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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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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
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The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
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Art without life is a poor affair.
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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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..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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Excellence does not require perfection.
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