Henry James
Art without life is a poor affair.Collection: Art
I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.Collection: Rocks
If this was love, love had been overrated.Collection: Overrated
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.Collection: Loyalty
We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art...what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.Collection: Beautiful
She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.Collection: Curiosity
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.'Collection: Writing
I think patriotism is like charity -- it begins at home.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Rome
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.Collection: Queens
Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.Collection: I Hate You
You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.Collection: Wish
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.Collection: Beautiful
I could come back to America..to die..but never, never to live.Collection: America
All the same don't forget that you're young — blessedly young; be glad of it on the contrary and live up to it. Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.Collection: Gratitude
She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Destiny
Keep making the movements of life.Collection: Movement
She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.Collection: Blue
There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.Collection: People
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Sweet
Kidd, turn off the light to spare my blushes.Collection: Light
Art is a point of view, and a genius way of looking at things.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Taken
His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed.Collection: Kissing
I recall this passage as the hour of its first fully coming over me that she was a beautiful liberal creature. I had seen her personality in glimpses and gleams, like a song sung in snatches, but now it was before me in a large rosy glow, as if it had been a full volume of sound. I heard the whole of the air, and it was sweet fresh music, which I was often to hum over.(Sir Edmund Orme)Collection: Beautiful
No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!Collection: Depth
It is indeed immensely picturesque. I can fancy sitting all a summer's day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world's duration and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in Stonehenge almost reassuring; and if you are disposed to feel that life is rather a superficial matter, and that we soon get to the bottom of things, the immemorial gray pillars may serve to remind you of the enormous background of time.Collection: Summer
..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.Collection: Smile
The practice of "reviewing"... in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.Collection: Art
It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it.Collection: Food
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.Collection: Hands
Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.Collection: Window
The fatal futility of Fact.Collection: Science
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?Collection: Ambition
What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?Collection: Writing
Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.Collection: Writing
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million, ... but they are, singly, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.Collection: House
Women never dine alone. When they dine alone they don't dine.Collection: Food
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!Collection: Simple
She is written in a foreign tongue.Collection: Tongue
We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.Collection: Practice
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.Collection: England
It's never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.Collection: Aberration
A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.Collection: Alive
I don't care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.Collection: Care
If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.Collection: Strong
To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.Collection: Book