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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.

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
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More quotes by Henry James

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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.
Henry James
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
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Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Henry James
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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
Henry James
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
Henry James
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It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
Henry James
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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
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
Henry James
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One is oneself a fine consequence.
Henry James
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I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
Henry James
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There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
Henry James
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There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.
Henry James
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
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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.
Henry James