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It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.

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
Surprised
Fool
Born
Never
Aberrations
Aberration
Permitted
Fools

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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
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To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
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I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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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.
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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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Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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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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..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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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
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