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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 504bd2e | She has been crying here and going on--she has quite upset me. | James Henry | ||
| 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 | ||
| bedd6fa | The arts of conversation which his circle cultivated were, in great part, the gossipacious arts: that of making much out of little, of displaying your wit and inventive facility, your ability to amuse, without boring your listeners with too many ideas, or unpleasantly stretching their minds on the rack of an "issue." It was a world which took an intense but mainly anecdotal interest in people, and which was therefore also on its guard again.. | William H. Gass | ||
| 3ff8b06 | Are you New World or Old?' 'Sounds like a novel by Henry James.' 'Never read him.' 'Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old. | Robertson Davies | ||
| 711f022 | Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs. | Henry James | ||
| 9376545 | When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will perhaps be content to leave it to take care of itself; or, at all events, you will not go out of your way to push its fortunes; for you will reflect that in the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons. In the long run,.. | criticism opinion truth | Henry James | |
| c829b63 | The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain. | ancient-egypt ancient-medicine biology brain hieroglyphic injuries medical-history neuroscience | James Henry Breasted | |
| 68d7cf2 | If he was not personally loud, however, he was deep, and during these closing days of the Roman May he knew a complacency that matched with slow irregular walks under the pines of the Villa Borghese, among the small sweet meadow-flowers and the mossy marbles. | Henry James | ||
| 2a73207 | He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves? | Henry James | ||
| e08dcfd | In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. | mathematics pure-research science university-of-michigan | James Henry Breasted | |
| c1e2856 | She was a plain-faced old woman, without graces and without any great elegance, but with an extreme respect for her own motives. She was usually prepared to explain these--when the explanation was asked as a favour; and in such a case they proved totally different from those that had been attributed to her | Henry James | ||
| 37ca647 | It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere inside me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him once and for ever. | inspirational pyschology | Henry James | |
| 0976108 | Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise." | Edmund Morris | ||
| df87e1d | Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hay.. | corporations democracy history information media politics technology | Timothy Wu | |
| 060e561 | some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile. | Henry James | ||
| ad46047 | Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives--I may say it--have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, .. | Henry James | ||
| deb4221 | It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perception. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item - to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of.. | Henry James | ||
| 0293c24 | Quote of the day: Quote of the day: We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. | Henry James | ||
| ccd994e | One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable--embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? | Henry James | ||
| ec93a72 | Everything he wanted was comprised moreover in a single boon--the common unattainable art of taking things as they came. He appeared to himself to have given his best years to an active appreciation of the way they didn't come; but perhaps--as they would seemingly here be things quite other--this long ache might at last drop to rest. | Henry James | ||
| 954bf6f | We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us; | Henry James | ||
| ebeb302 | In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself. Entering the perimeters of the white arch, one was greeted by the sounds of bongos and acoustic guitars, protest singers, political arguments, activists leafleting, older chess players challenged by the young. This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem to be oppressive to anyone. | new-york-city | Patti Smith | |
| df26b73 | I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. | Henry James | ||
| 42d8438 | What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live? Something--and this reached him with a pang--that he, John Marcher, hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's arid end. No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?... The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. | Henry James | ||
| c439d48 | Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact th.. | fiction-writing life morality | James Wood | |
| 60a7271 | She was afraid,' said Mrs. Bread, very confidently; 'she has always been afraid, or at least for a long time. That was the real trouble, sir. She was like a fair peach, I may say, with just one little speck. She had one little sad spot. You pushed her into the sunshine, sir, and it almost disappeared. Then they pulled her back into the shade and in a moment it began to spread. Before we knew it she was gone. She was a delicate creature. | Henry James | ||
| a1c099c | He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass. | Henry James | ||
| 14158d8 | Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished. The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance--he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, THE man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. That was the rare stroke--that was his visitation. So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted. .. | Henry James | ||
| 61ac9ec | I would live for you still--if I could." Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying. "But I can't!" she said as she raised them again to take leave of him. She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom." | Henry James | ||
| c079da7 | You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose. | Henry James | ||
| 34ed5db | Her tact had to reckon with the Atlantic Ocean, the General Post-Office and the extravagant curve of the globe. | Henry James | ||
| 1726e1c | I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven Than I live to Walden even. I am its stony shore, And the breeze that passes o'er; In the hollow of my hand Are its water and its sand, | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 024279b | Cerise Mar voiced a polite and a nonviolent request that they get the hell off our land, which was refused. | Ilona Andrews | ||
| 6744ab2 | Penso che dovremmo essere uomini prima di essere sudditi. Non e da augurarsi che l'uomo coltivi il rispetto per le leggi ma piuttosto che rispetti cio che e giusto. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| a935353 | Las obras de los grandes poetas aun no han sido leidas por la humanidad -solo los grandes poetas son capaces de leerlas-. Las masas, sin embargo, las leen como si leyeran las estrellas...; si hay suerte, como astrologos, pero no como astronomos. A la mayoria de las personas se les ensena a leer solo para su propia comodidad, como si se les ensenara a contar para que puedan comprobar las cuentas y no ser enganados. Pero del leer como noble e.. | lectura | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 034da64 | I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds--it will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor--disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinction.. | Henry David Thoreau | ||
| 92540d5 | It is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universal favor with which the New Testament is outwardly received, and even the bigotry with which it is defended, there is no hospitality shown to, there is no appreciation of, the order of truth with which it deals. | new-testament religion | Henry David Thoreau | |
| 2f88f6e | The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks. | speech | Henry David Thoreau | |
| dc168b9 | Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. | Henry David Thoreau |