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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.

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
Whole
Life
Metropolis
London
Possible
Form

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The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
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Things are always different from what they might be.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
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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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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
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Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
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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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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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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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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
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The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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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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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
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