Quote

To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.

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
Strong
Press
Dispel
Book
Solitude
Visitor
Much
However
Arrival
Time
Imagination
Lightness
Love
Situation
Arrivals
Quality
Visitors
Knowledge
Unexpected
Upon
Presses
Fertilizing

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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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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.
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It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
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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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There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.
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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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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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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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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
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There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
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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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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
Henry James