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Adjectives are the sugar of literature and adverbs the salt.

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
Adverbs
Adjectives
Salt
Sugar
Literature

More quotes by Henry James

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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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A solitary maple on a woodside flames in single scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a noble house dressed for a fancy ball, with the whole family gathered around to admire her before she goes.
Henry James
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The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.
Henry James
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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!
Henry James
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I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.
Henry James
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A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.
Henry James
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
Henry James
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One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.
Henry James
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She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
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Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active when the door was not open it jumped out the window.
Henry James
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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
Henry James
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Americans will eat garbage provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup.
Henry James
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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
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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 . . .
Henry James
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Cats and monkeys monkeys and cats all human life is there.
Henry James
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
Henry James
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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James