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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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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
Experience
Pounds
Light
Checks
Might
Friendly
Tact
Way
Impulse
Pound
Notes
Cigarette
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Note
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Check
Five
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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She envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more — this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land.
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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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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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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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.
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
Henry James
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There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
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Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
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A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
Henry James
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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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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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Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.
Henry James
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
Henry James