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Things are always different from what they might be.

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
Different
Always
Things
Journey
Spiritual
Might

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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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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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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
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We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
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One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
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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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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
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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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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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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.
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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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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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
Henry James