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"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."
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"I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love."

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."

"True respect comes when we fend for ourselves without the aid of anyone, and when we owned something and say, 'this is my own'! Not necessarily as a way of boasting of our abundance and grace, but having a feeling that we can use it without obstruction, or being asked to return the favor."

"Because if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, 'I should think -but you know best- that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think -but you know best- she was not worth gaining over."

"A desire and a goal not to be subservient to another or to be in charge of one's life is a good thing to do."

"What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!"

"For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom."

"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has-from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."

"Never let a day be your control factor."
Explore more quotes by Henry James

"Her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it."

"I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do."

"I don't want everyone to like me, I should think less of myself if some people did."

"That was originally what I had loved him for: that at a period when our native land was nude and crude and provincial, when the famous 'atmosphere' it is supposed to lack was not even missed, when literature was lonely there and art and form akmost impossible, he had found the means to live and write like one of the first; to be free and general and not at all afraid; to feel, understand, and express everything."

"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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