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An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.

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
Never
Englishman
Englishmen
Holding
Tongue
Literature
Natural

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You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
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Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
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Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
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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.
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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
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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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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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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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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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Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
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