Henry James
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.Collection: Caring
I had an excellent repast - the best repast possible - which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed ....It might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can be reasonably expected of it.Collection: Memorable
I am blackly bored when they are at large and at work; but somehow I am still more blackly bored when they are shut up in Holloway and we are deprived of them.Collection: Bored
To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?Collection: Stupid
London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.Collection: Feet
It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.Collection: Poetry
The image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go -this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short - he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.Collection: Fear
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.Collection: Artist
No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.Collection: Hurt
That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy.Collection: Crafts
We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.Collection: Artist
It is altogether an extraordinary growing, swarming, glittering, pushing, chattering, good-natured, cosmopolitan place, and perhaps in some ways the best imitation of Paris that can be found (with a great originality of its own).Collection: New York
Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.Collection: Dream
The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.Collection: Time
The artist beholds in nature more than she herself Nature is conscious of.Collection: Art
He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.Collection: Ifs
Oxford lends sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure.Collection: Oxford
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.Collection: Black
New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.Collection: New York
Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.Collection: Wish
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.Collection: Wish
She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.Collection: Elbows
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.Collection: Reading
I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.Collection: Pain
Her memory's your love. You want no other.Collection: Memories
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Views
When I am wicked I am in high spirits.Collection: Wicked
I have only to let myself go! So I have said all my life, yet I have never fully done it.Collection: Freedom
...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.Collection: Paris
My father ain't in Europe; my father's in a better place than Europe." Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial reward. But Randolph immediately added, "My father's in Schenectady.Collection: Children
Writing is not primarily escape, but use.Collection: Writing
Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.Collection: Wine
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.Collection: Art
She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.Collection: Country
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.Collection: Girl
Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Artist
People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.Collection: Freedom
She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.Collection: Sunshine
It was the way the autumn day looked into the high windows as it waned; the way the red light, breaking at the close from under a low sombre sky, reached out in a long shaft and played over old wainscots, old tapestry, old gold, old colour.Collection: Autumn
Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!Collection: Dream
It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Clever
Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!Collection: People
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 . . .Collection: Fire
I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.Collection: Girl
In a play, certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work-it is the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is shapeless, the work must be amorphous.Collection: Art
The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.Collection: Liberty