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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

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
Give
Tenths
Find
Vastly
Giving
Possess
Would
Somehow
People
Nine
Meet
Interesting
Ends

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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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Excellence does not require perfection.
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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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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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.
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Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
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All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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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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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
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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.
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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