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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
Worse
Worst
Always
Expected

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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.
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What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
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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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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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If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it set to work and you will feel like it.
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There's no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
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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.
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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
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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.
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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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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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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
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To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
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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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Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
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