Henry James

“Life is a predicament which precedes death.”

“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promo...”

“But will they make themselves agreeable to me? That's what I like people to do. I don't hesitate to say so, because I always appreciate it.”

“Heaven deliver me from my friends!”

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”

“When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.”

“It seemed to her at last that she would do well to take a book; formerly, when heavy-hearted, she had been able, with the help of some well-chosen volume, to transfer the seat of consciousne...”

“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.”

“The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a gre...”

“Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.”

“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...”

“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”

“In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.”

“A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”

“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.”

“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

“Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and cat...”

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

“Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”