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"You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto."
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"There's a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go."

"Sometimes you don't know when you're taking the first step through a door until you're already inside."

"Great is the art of beginning but greater is the art of ending."

"Too often our lives are soiled to desperation by endings that in reality are magnificently outnumbered by beginnings. And unless we become convinced that an ending is always the birthplace of a beginning that is on its way, we will live terribly soiled lives."

"Transitional periods in life are unsettling because a person's latent fears constantly whisper warnings."

"Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives."

"I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones."

"The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism."

"We move between two darknesses."

"Let go of what was and embrace what to be."
Explore more quotes by Henry James

"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."

"Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women."

"One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left."

"I might show it to you, but you'd never see it. The privilege isn't given to every one; it's not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it."

"She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul."

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