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

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
Story
Seed
Germ
Hands
Wherever
Sprung
Stories
Seeds
Hint
Ever
Shape
Germs
Shapes
Gathered
Single
Hints
Hand
Remote
Incubation
Small
Casual
Strained

More quotes by Henry James

Image
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Henry James
Image
Art without life is a poor affair.
Henry James
Image
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
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
In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
Image
Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
Henry James
Image
I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
Henry James
Image
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
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
A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
Henry James
Image
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James
Image
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
Image
Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
Henry James
Image
If you haven't had your life what have you had?
Henry James
Image
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
Image
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
Image
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
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