Quote

Always keep a window in the attic open not just cracked: open.

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
Cracked
Window
Open
Keep
Always
Attic
Attics

More quotes by Henry James

Image
I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.
Henry James
Image
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
Henry James
Image
Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
Image
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
Henry James
Image
There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.
Henry James
Image
It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.
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
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Henry James
Image
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.
Henry James
Image
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
Henry James
Image
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.
Henry James
Image
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.
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
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
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
One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.
Henry James
Image
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
Image
She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.
Henry James
Image
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
Henry James
Image
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