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The Turn of the Screw QUOTES

The Turn of the Screw QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

3 " No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear! "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

4 " Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

5 " He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

6 " Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

7 " —his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

8 " There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

9 " I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

10 " If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—? "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

11 " I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

12 " It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

13 " I was a screen-- I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

14 " The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

15 " ...he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss... "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

16 " I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I? "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

17 " I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

18 " We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

19 " It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw

20 " The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. "

― Henry James , The Turn of the Screw