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"The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her."
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"The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around? "Darling, what do you mean? "There wasn't a person there who enjoyed it," she said, her voice lifeless, "or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant."Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay." How? By being stupid?"
"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."
"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."
"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape."
"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
"It is not all books that are as dull as their readers."
"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."
"If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land."
"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."
"She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest 'Never!' I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed my hat: 'I know what to think then. It's nothing!"
"I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it."
"True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand."
"Her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in 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. If you haven't had that what have you had?"
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