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"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth."
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"The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature."
"Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence, many epic tales are pretty much epic crap."
"Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ..."
"I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most."
"I wasn't discriminating in my reading, and I'm still not. I read then primarily to be entertained, as I do now. And I'm not saying that apologetically: I feel that if you remove the initial gut response from reading - the delight or excitement or simply the enjoyment of being told a story - and try to concentrate on the meaning or the shape of the "message" first, you might as well give up, it's too much like all work and no play."
"In describing a fairy story which they think adults might possibly read for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that begun thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate."
"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
"The story of the book filled the car with exciting adventures of the sort that are fun to read about, so we didn't have to think about the exciting adventures of the sort that are no fun to live through."
"The reader is probably wondering that if Tolkien did indeed fashion two of his heroic characters from Catholic prophecies, what about the evil protagonists? Were any of them inspired by these little-known revelations concerning future times? The answer is yes, but to discover the links between the myth and the prophecies, we must venture not only into the realm of unnerving revelations, but also into the murky world of secret sects, dark plots, occult signs, bloody revolutions and conspiracy theories ~ we must probe deep into the burning Eye of Sauron."
"Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"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."
"If I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur."
"It's very silly, she said, "but I go on with it in spite of myself. I'm afraid I'm too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can't read it."
"We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie."
"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."
"I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and wrong."
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