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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
Liberty
Use
Take
Dramatist
Really
Liberties
Documents
Historian
Essentially
Wants

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If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
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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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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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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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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
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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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A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
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No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!
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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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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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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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