Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Ever
Shape
Germs
Shapes
Gathered
Single
Hints
Hand
Remote
Incubation
Small
Casual
Strained
Story
Seed
Germ
Hands
Wherever
Sprung
Stories
Seeds
Hint
More quotes by Henry James
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
My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
Henry James
The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Henry James
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James
In art economy is always beauty.
Henry James
To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.
Henry James
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
Henry James
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
Henry James
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
Henry James
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
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
Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
Henry James
Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
Henry James
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
Henry James
Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Henry James
If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
Henry James
