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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
Dark
Give
Giving
Work

More quotes by Henry James

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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
Henry James
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
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Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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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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
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
Henry James
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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
Henry James
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
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To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
Henry James
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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
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James