Quote

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

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
Taken
Check
Five
Showing
Experience
Pounds
Light
Checks
Might
Friendly
Tact
Way
Impulse
Pound
Notes
Cigarette
Asks
Note

More quotes by Henry James

Image
Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.
Henry James
Image
It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life exept play games
Henry James
Image
Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
Image
You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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
England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
Henry James
Image
Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
Henry James
Image
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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
Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
Henry James
Image
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?
Henry James
Image
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
Henry James
Image
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
Image
I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. So as to do them? asked her aunt. So as to choose. said Isabel
Henry James