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If you haven't had your life what have you had?

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
Havens
Haven
Life

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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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Art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity.
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
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I always want to know the things one shouldn't do. So as to do them? asked her aunt. So as to choose. said Isabel
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
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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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A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
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I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.
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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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All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
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Her memory's your love. You want no other.
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Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
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I would give all I possess to get out of myself but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.
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Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
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If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
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do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?” “Good for what?” asked the Doctor. “You are good for nothing unless you are clever.
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