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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.

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
Giving
Work
Dark
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More quotes by Henry James

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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
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There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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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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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Henry James
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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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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
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Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
Henry James
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James