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Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

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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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.
Henry James
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The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Henry James
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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?
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England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
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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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To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
Henry James
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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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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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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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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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