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The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

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
Use
Take
Dramatist
Really
Liberties
Documents
Historian
Essentially
Wants
Liberty

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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.
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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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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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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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There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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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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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.
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I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.
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England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
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In art economy is always beauty.
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To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.
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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.
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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