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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
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
Worst
Always
Expected
Worse
More quotes by Henry James
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry James
It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
Henry James
Deep experience is never peaceful.
Henry James
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
Henry James
I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
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
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.
Henry James
Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
Henry James
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
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.
Henry James
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.
Henry James
Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.
Henry James
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
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.
Henry James
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
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
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James
We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
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
