Quote

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

Henry James

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Haven
Life
Havens

More quotes by Henry James

Image
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
Henry James
Image
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
Image
The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.
Henry James
Image
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?
Henry James
Image
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.
Henry James
Image
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
Image
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
Henry James
Image
I intend to judge things for myself to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
Henry James
Image
Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
Henry James
Image
If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
Henry James
Image
Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
Henry James
Image
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?
Henry James
Image
One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
Image
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James
Image
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.
Henry James