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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
Documents
Historian
Essentially
Wants
Liberty
Use
Take
Dramatist
Really
Liberties
More quotes by Henry James
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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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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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
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If you haven't had your life what have you had?
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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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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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
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.
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.
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
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.
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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
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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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
Henry James
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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
