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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.

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
Trying

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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
Henry James
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
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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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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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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.
Henry James
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
Henry James
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Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
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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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It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
Henry James
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Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
Henry James
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
Henry James