Henry James

Summer afternoon - Summer afternoon... the two most beautiful words in the English language.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self- conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations are in a conspiracy to under-value them.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

Deep experience is never peaceful.

There are three things that are important in human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

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.

Summer afternoon-summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Live all you can - it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?

She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

She had an unequalled gift... of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

His idea was simply what a man's idea always is--to put every effort off on the woman.

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

There are women who are for all your 'times of life.' They're the most wonderful sort.

It has been my fate, and one's fate one accepts. It's a dreadful thing to have to say, in so wicked a world.

Thank goodness you're a failure-- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you--look at the successes. Would you BE one, on your honour?

Thanks to his constant habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the lees rising as usual into his draught.

For the worst sign of all--as I must have it for you-- is that you can't help me. That's when a woman pities.

I feel how little she can like being told of her owing me anything. No woman ever enjoys such an obligation to another woman.

It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence; the silence was a sacred hush, a finer clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed.

"There are certainly moments," said Chad, "when you seem to me too good to be true. Yet if you are true," he added, "that seems to be all that need concern me."

Even when a thing's already nice there mostly is some other thing that would have been nicer - or as to which we wonder if it wouldn't.

She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault.

Small and fat and constantly facetious, straw- coloured and destitute of marks, he would have been practically indistinguishable hadn't his constant preference for light-grey clothes, for white hats, for very big cigars and very little stories, done what it could for his identity.

He had the entertainment of thinking that if he had for that moment stopped the clock it was to promote the next minute this still livelier motion.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.