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"It's very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I'm rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I've beenshockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I've been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard-the quiet, dusky cupboard where there's an odour of stale spices-as much as I can. Butwhen I've to come out and into a strong light-then, my dear, I'm a horror!"
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Exlpore more Sensitivity quotes
"Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that's the case, we may choose not to risk."
"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."
"Much more likely you'll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I've got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands."
"I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light."
"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."
"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."
"I enabled your tendency to be vulnerable and weak, and your habits of crying when 6,000 others were present for the music."
"I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?"
"It was so hard to feel safe in the world when you were a girl."
"I was emotionally erect."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged."
"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."
"There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition."
"He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts."
"To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own."
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