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The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.

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
Great
Things
Merciless
Possessions
Possession
Behinds
Behind
Black

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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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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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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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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!
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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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Art without life is a poor affair.
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Deep experience is never peaceful.
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One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
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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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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.
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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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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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