Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Going
Pieces
Apparently
Would
Hear
Understands
Like
Least
Sensations
Reading
Poems
Comport
Less
Lady
Browning
Read
Hated
Latest
Understand
Findings
Bite
Even
Finding
Bites

More quotes by Henry James

Image
England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
Henry James
Image
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry James
Image
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
Image
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
Henry James
Image
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
Henry James
Image
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
Image
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
Henry James
Image
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
Image
Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
Henry James
Image
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Henry James
Image
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.
Henry James
Image
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Henry James
Image
We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
Henry James
Image
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
Henry James
Image
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
Image
Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
Henry James