Henry James quotes

“I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.”

— Spoken by a character · Part II

As he stood there he began to murmur Byron’s famous lines, out of “Manfred,” but before he had finished his quotation he remembered that if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors.

She seemed to him, in all this, an extraordinary mixture of innocence and crudity.

She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect.

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma.

I think I like the English best. I like their style of conversation. But there are some lovely Americans. I never saw anything so hospitable. There’s something or other every day. There’s not much dancing; but I must say I never thought dancing was everything. I was always fond of conversation.

— Spoken by a character · Part II

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her.

I hardly know whether it was the analogies or the differences that were uppermost in the mind of a young American, who, two or three years ago, sat in the garden of the “Trois Couronnes,” looking about him, rather idly, at some of the graceful objects I have mentioned.

He found her that evening in the garden, wandering about in the warm starlight like an indolent sylph, and swinging to and fro the largest fan he had ever beheld. It was ten o’clock.

There was a waning moon in the sky, and her radiance was not brilliant, but she was veiled in a thin cloud curtain which seemed to diffuse and equalize it.

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

“I’m very fond of my liberty.”

— Spoken by a character · Chapter II

If one’s strong one loves only the more strongly.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XVI

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XVII

One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XIX

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out of the window.

Henrietta was a literary woman, and the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything.

Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it--to make any sort of success of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality!

— Henrietta · Chapter XX

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and the agitations of the world.

It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.

He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him.

“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!”

— Spoken by a character · VII

He was there or was not there: not there if I didn’t see him.

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.

Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.

People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter VII