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

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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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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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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
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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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Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
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If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
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And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
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An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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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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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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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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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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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 . . .
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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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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.
Henry James