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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
Talent
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Idiosyncrasy
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Idiosyncrasies
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Whatever
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More quotes by Henry James

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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.
Henry James
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
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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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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
Henry James
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
Henry James
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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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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
Henry James
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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Experience is never limited, and it is never complete
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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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?
Henry James
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
Henry James
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James