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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
Salt
Sugar
Literature
Adverbs
Adjectives

More quotes by Henry James

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There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
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Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.
Henry James
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
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Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
Henry James
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Summer afternoon, summer afternoon to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
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His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.
Henry James
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We work in the dark -- we do what we can -- we give what we have.
Henry James
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To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing.
Henry James
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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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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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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..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry James
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Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.
Henry James
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My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
Henry James
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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
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Things are always different from what they might be.
Henry James