" His experience of the world and his empathy for other people produced a body of work that adamantly refused ready categories, received ideas, and preordained notions of all kinds in favor of the difficult, strange, tender, and always multifarious arena of human relations and emotions. I think James felt that every attempt to reduce life to a system of beliefs - religious, political, or philosophical - must inevitably become a form of lying. "
― Siri Hustvedt , A Plea for Eros: Essays