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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.

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
Always
Things
Never
Wait
Waiting
Change
Anything
Might
Different

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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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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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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
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Art without life is a poor affair.
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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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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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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