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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

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
Lift
Lifts
Essentially
Poetry
Prosaic
Effort
Muscular
Mind
Prolonged
Exhibits
Strain

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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
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The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
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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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The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
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Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
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You think too much.' 'I suppose I do but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.
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If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
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She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
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Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
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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.
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Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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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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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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