|
1da7b6f
|
Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
13b7cb6
|
I'll watch with you.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
0b0e9e9
|
I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.
|
|
sex
romance
love
inspirational
gender
sexuality
|
Henry James |
|
3baf6c6
|
It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
715dcb7
|
It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
9141329
|
Keep making the movements of life.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
238d5cf
|
There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
a3fb6ea
|
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.
|
|
edgar-allan-poe
|
Henry James |
|
fe2013c
|
Who was she, what was she that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that she pretended to be larger than this large occasion? If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
ea8d330
|
there was always a sort of tacit understanding among women, born of the solidarity of the sex, that they should discover or invent lovers for each other...
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
af9815a
|
since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
bb6b1f8
|
Oh," said Catherine, with some eagerness, "it doesn't take long to like a person--when once you begin."
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
51515c6
|
Am I grave?', he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.' 'You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
da2aedf
|
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
cc710b2
|
The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
3d245e5
|
Mr. Morris's poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous ,--a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman's own productions, and that his ar..
|
|
poetry
geoffrey-chaucer
william-morris
literary-criticism
|
Henry James |
|
1820c1f
|
The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
8f77b5c
|
He was allying himself to science, for what was science but the absence of prejudice backed by the presence of money? His life would be full of machinery, which was the antidote to superstition ...
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
f564a34
|
though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist..
|
|
haunting
|
Henry James |
|
8fcd575
|
there was something superior even in his injustice, and absolute in his mistakes.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
fa76e6f
|
When you are successful you naturally feel more at home
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
cb9a6de
|
There is no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
b073ae2
|
The sense of success -the most agreeable emotion of the human heart
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
4753766
|
That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything.
|
|
poetical-passion
power-of-will
power-of-words
|
Henry James |
|
e8d2d21
|
The smash was their walk, their dejeuner, their omelette, the Chablis, the place, the view, their present talk and his present pleasure in it--to say nothing, wonder of wonders, of her own. To this tune and nothing less, accordingly, was his surrender made good. It sufficiently lighted up at least the folly of holding off. Ancient proverbs sounded, for his memory, in the tone of their words and the clink of their glasses, in the hum of the ..
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
42b76cf
|
She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
b556786
|
Under all his culture, his cleverness, his amenity, under his good-nature, his facility, his knowledge of life, his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
985fc38
|
The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes--in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaiter..
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
c91c6bb
|
She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
82e2c32
|
Why indeed should we perpetually be thinking whether things are good for us, as if we were patients lying in a hospital?
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
2ae0c10
|
He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.
|
|
pleasures-of-life
puritan
meaning-of-life
focus
|
Henry James |
|
c4cef88
|
She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
619b06b
|
He was a dim secondary social success -- and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks -- just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of 'ombres chinoises' [French: "shadow play"]."
|
|
light
sound
shadows
|
Henry James |
|
3feefe8
|
It had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Juliana in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau; and it had not been less so to have to believe for a good many hours after that it was highly probable I had killed her.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
13007d7
|
It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there--and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it--very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy q..
|
|
haunted-house
haunting
|
Henry James |
|
d2f8c65
|
I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made ..
|
|
life
|
Henry James |
|
25709fd
|
How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
47af1c3
|
He's the victim of a critical age; he has ceased to believe in himself and he doesn't know what to believe in.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
e08510c
|
Changing the form of one's mission's almost as difficult as changing the shape of one's nose: there they are, each, in the middle of one's face and one's character--one has to begin too far back.
|
|
human-characteristics
noses
|
Henry James |
|
147578e
|
She often appeared at my chambers to talk over his lapses; for if, as she declared, she had washed her hands of him, she had carefully preserved the water of this ablution, which she handed about for analysis.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
28ddaa4
|
prevaricated
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
0f0df80
|
Our friend was slightly nervous; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
f013926
|
Madame de Cintre's face had, to Newman's eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother's white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines.
|
|
|
Henry James |
|
6f85361
|
They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.
|
|
|
Henry James |