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1 " It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story. "
― Henry James , The Portrait of a Lady
2 " I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours. "
3 " Live all you can: it's a mistake not to. It doesn't matter what you do in particular, so long as you have had your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? "
― Henry James , The Ambassadors
4 " 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. "
― Henry James , Roderick Hudson
5 " She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. "
― Henry James , What Maisie Knew
6 " Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal. "
― Henry James
7 " It's time to start living the life you've imagined. "
8 " Life is a predicament which precedes death. "
9 " 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 promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. "
― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw
10 " Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic. "
11 " The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. "
12 " People are free to find out the best and the worst of me! "
― Henry James , Watch and Ward
13 " 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. "
― Henry James , The Middle Years
14 " It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process. "
15 " ..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. "
16 " Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people’s imagination. "
17 " 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. "
18 " The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma "
― Henry James , Daisy Miller
19 " If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it. "
20 " I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will. "
