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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.

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
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Wish
Mortem
Exploiter
Frustrate
Utterly
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Autobiography may be the preeminent kind of American expression.
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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.
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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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One is oneself a fine consequence.
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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.
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I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
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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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Excellence does not require perfection.
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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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London is on the whole the most possible form of life.
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Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
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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.
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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.
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Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.
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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.
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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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To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
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The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
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To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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