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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
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More quotes by Henry James

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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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A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
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Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.
Henry James
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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
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
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Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Henry James
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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
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I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
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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
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We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
Henry James
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She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
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It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
Henry James
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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
Henry James
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To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that this, doubtless, is the right way to live.
Henry James
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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
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It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
Henry James
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
Henry James
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And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
Henry James
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Ideas are, in truth, force.
Henry James