Quote

Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

Henry James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Henry James

Image
She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
Henry James
Image
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
Image
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
Image
Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Henry James
Image
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
Image
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
Image
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
Henry James
Image
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
Image
I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
Henry James
Image
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James
Image
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James
Image
The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me, the germ of a story, and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
Henry James
Image
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
Image
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Henry James
Image
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!
Henry James
Image
There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
Henry James
Image
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James