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Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!

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
May
Prove
Like
Poetry
Faggots
Genius
Combustible
Present
Flicker
Least
Pile
Race
Poets
Simple
Train
Happy
Poet

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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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The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
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Things are always different from what they might be.
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The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me, the germ of a story, and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
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In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
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Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.
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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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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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You must save what you can of your life you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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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.
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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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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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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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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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Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
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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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