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"I never did anything in life to anyone's imagination."
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"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."
"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened."
"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
"The lot of the brideto be wed before beddesired until rotten.The lot of the authorto be read before bedadmired then forgotten."
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
"No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate, he said frankly. "And books, they offer hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"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."
"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?"
"Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."
"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
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