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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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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
Round
Gruesome
House
Rounds
Breathless
Stories
Christmas
Remark
Held
Sufficiently
Obvious
Remarks
Except
Tale
Strange
Essentially
Fire
Tales

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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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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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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.
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And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
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The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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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.
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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.
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I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
Henry James