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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.

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
Art
Task
Give
Madness
Giving
Tasks
Work
Rest
Life
Doubt
Passion
Dark
Inspirational

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Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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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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Things are always different from what they might be.
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I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
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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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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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Art without life is a poor affair.
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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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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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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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
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Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
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Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
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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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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
Henry James