Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916) was an American-born writer. He is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 April 1843
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
thinking add stature
Which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit?
beauty beautiful useless-things
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
simple race poetry
Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to laya train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
country civilization texture
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.
black possession behinds
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
country writing civilization
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
judging pieces may
The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.
men infinite revealing
God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
destiny men institutions
Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.
alive forget ignorance-is-bliss
When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
responsibility discovery luxury
The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.
art life-is affair
Art without life is a poor affair.
england boxes conversation
Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.
waiting feels ifs
If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.