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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?

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
Success
Completely
Art
Line
Worth
Talent
Lines
Idiosyncrasy
Happened
Idiosyncrasies
Literature
Powder
Whatever
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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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You must save what you can of your life you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
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Excellence does not require perfection.
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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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There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
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The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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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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Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
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All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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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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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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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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