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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.

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
Understanding
Two
Something
Way
Several
Oneself
Meant
Neither
Ways

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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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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
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You think too much.' 'I suppose I do but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
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Things are always different from what they might be.
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. So as to do them? asked her aunt. So as to choose. said Isabel
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I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
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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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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.
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One is oneself a fine consequence.
Henry James