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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
Born
Never
Aberrations
Aberration
Permitted
Fools
Surprised
Fool

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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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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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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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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.
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Art without life is a poor affair.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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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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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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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.
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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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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.
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I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. So as to do them? asked her aunt. So as to choose. said Isabel
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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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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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
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