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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

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
Good
Clever
Unless
Nothing

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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
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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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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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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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One is oneself a fine consequence.
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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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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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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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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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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
Henry James