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"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 of me."
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"If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by her ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future- staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage. Humility is the master key that can get you out of all your cages; why do you choose your ego and stay in your prisons?"

"I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

"I was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1943."

"Serious people make a decision to read your fully story before they write you off. Don't worry about those who don't have time to know you."

"But suppose your dA mon settles in a shape you don't like?Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dA mon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up."

"It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly."
Explore more quotes by Henry James

"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?"

"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints."

"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."

"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."

"To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live."

"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."

"If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it."

"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."
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