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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

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
Defend
Defense
Doesn

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The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
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There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.
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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.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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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 historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
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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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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Henry James
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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.
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
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Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
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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.
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It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.
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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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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James