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"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."
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Exlpore more Reading quotes
"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
"If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul."
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
"In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should."
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
"And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to."
"Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight."
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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