Quote

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

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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
Seen
Pattern
Almost
Gifts
Experience
Patterns
Cluster
Power
Judge
Clusters
May
Piece
Constitute
Whole
Guess
Trace
Things
Judging
Implications
Pieces
Unseen

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She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
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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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Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
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There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
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She is written in a foreign tongue.
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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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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
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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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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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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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...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.
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Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
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I have lived too long in foreign parts
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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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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In art economy is always beauty.
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The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
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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.
Henry James