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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.

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
Allowed
Ground
Wish
Wanted
Look
Mill
Looks
Mills
Life
Punished
Conventional

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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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It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.
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do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
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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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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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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
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Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
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There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
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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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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