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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.

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
Life
Beauty
Interest
Whatever
Force
Substitute
Process
Substitutes
Makes
Application
Art
Consideration
Things
Importance

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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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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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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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Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me, the germ of a story, and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
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..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
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If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
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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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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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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.
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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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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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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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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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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
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The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.
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