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The Image Of The Presence, Whatever It Was, Waiting There For Him To Go -this Image Had Not Yet Been So Concrete For His Nerves As When He Stopped Short Of The Point At Which Certainty Would Have Come To Him. For, With All His Resolution, Or More Exactly With All His Dread, He Did Stop Short - He Hung Back From Really Seeing. The Risk Was Too Great And His Fear Too Definite: It Took At This Moment An Awful Specific Form.

-Henry James

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The Image Of The

Henry James

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The Image Of The Presence, Whatever It Was, Waiting There For Him To Go -this Image Had Not Yet Been So Concrete For His Nerves As When He Stopped Short Of The Point At Which Certainty Would Have Come To Him. For, With All His Resolution, Or More Exactly With All His Dread, He Did Stop Short - He Hung Back From Really Seeing. The Risk Was Too Great And His Fear Too Definite: It Took At This Moment An Awful Specific Form.

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I Ought To Tell You That I'm Probably Your Cousin.

My Sole Wish Is To Frustrate As Utterly As Possible The Post-mortem Exploiter.

Most English Talk Is A Quadrille In A Sentry-box.

All The Same Don't Forget That You're Young — Blessedly Young; Be Glad Of It On The Contrary And Live Up To It. 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.

To Take What There Is In Life And Use It, Without Waiting Forever In Vain For The Preconceived, To Dig Deep Into The Actual And Get Something Out Of That; This, Doubtless, Is The Right Way To Live.

Love Has Nothing To Do With Good Reasons.

Kidd, Turn Off The Light To Spare My Blushes.

It Might Seem That An Egg Which Has Succeeded In Being Fresh Has Done All That Can Reasonably Be Expected Of It.

Money's A Horrid Thing To Follow, But A Charming Thing To Meet.

It Takes A Great Deal Of History To Produce A Little Literature.

It Exhibits The Effort Of An Essentially Prosaic Mind To Lift Itself, By A Prolonged Muscular Strain, Into Poetry.

Every Good Story Is Of Course Both A Picture And An Idea, And The More They Are Interfused The Better.

If The Artist Is Necessarily Sensitive, Does That Sensitiveness Form In Its Essence A State Constantly Liable To Shade Off Into The Morbid? Does This Liability, Moreover, Increase In Proportion As The Effort Is Great And The Ambition Intense?

Keep Making The Movements Of Life.

The Time-honored Bread-sauce Of The Happy Ending.

If This Was Love, Love Had Been Overrated.

...he Had Long Decided That Abundant Laughter Should Be The Embellishment Of The Remainder Of His Days.

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.

Make The Short Story Tremendously Succinct - With A Very Short Pulse Or Rhythm - And The Closest Selection Of Detail - In Other Words Summarise Intensely And Deeply And Keep Down The Lateral Development. It Should Be A Little Gem Of Bright, Quick, Vivid Form

Her Chief Dread In Life, At This Period Of Her Development, Was That She Would Appear Narrow Minded; What She Feared Next Afterwards Was That She Should Be So.

Though It Might Have Its Momentary Alarms, Paternity Is Not An Exciting Vocation.

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.

New York Is Appalling, Fantastically Charmless And Elaborately Dire.

I've Always Expected The Worst, And It's Always Worse Than I Expected.

Autobiography May Be The Preeminent Kind Of American Expression.

In The Long Run An Opinion Often Borrows Credit From The Forbearance Of Its Patrons.

Which Of You With Taking Thought Can Add To His Stature One Cubit?

She Is Like A Revolving Lighthouse; Pitch Darkness Alternating With A Dazzling Brilliancy!

To Believe In A Child Is To Believe In The Future.

Her Imagination Was By Habit Ridiculously Active; When The Door Was Not Open It Jumped Out The Window.

I Don’t Think I Pity Her. She Doesn’t Strike Me As A Girl That Suggests Compassion. I Think I Envy Her... I Don’t Know Whether She Is A Gifted Being, But She Is A Clever Girl, With A Strong Will And A High Temper. She Has No Idea Of Being Bored...very Pretty Indeed; But I Don’t Insist Upon That. It’s Her General Air Of Being Someone In Particular That Strikes Me.

Innocent And Infinite Are The Pleasures Of Observation.

It's Time To Start Living The Life You've Imagined.

Take The Word For It Of A Man Who Has Made His Way Inch By Inch, And Does Not Believe That We'll Wake Up To Find Our Work Done Because We've Lain All Night A-dreaming Of It; Anything Worth Doing Is Devilish Hard To Do!

Live All You Can; It's A Mistake Not To.

Inspirational Life

It Is No Wonder He Wins Every Game. He Has Never Done A Thing In His Life Exept Play Games

To Kill A Human Being Is, After All, The Least Injury You Can Do Him.

The Critical Sense Is So Far From Frequent That It Is Absolutely Rare, And The Possession Of The Cluster Of Qualities That Minister To It Is One Of The Highest Distinctions... In This Light One Sees The Critic As The Real Helper Of The Artist, A Torchbearing Outrider, The Interpreter, The Brother... Just In Proportion As He Is Sentient And Restless, Just In Proportion As He Reacts And Reciprocates And Penetrates, Is The Critic A Valuable Instrument.

Ideas Are, In Truth, Force.

All Roads Lead To Rome, And There Were Times When It Might Have Struck Us That Almost Every Branch Of Study Or Subject Of Conversation Skirted Forbidden Ground.

Nothing, Of Course, Will Ever Take The Place Of The Good Old Fashion Of 'liking' A Work Of Art Or Not Liking It; The More Improved Criticism Will Not Abolish That Primitive, That Ultimate, Test.

And Remember This, That If You've Been Hated, You've Also Been Loved.

I Am Incapable Of Telling You Not To Feel. Feel, Feel, I Say - Feel For All You're Worth, And Even If It Half Kills You, For That Is The Only Way To Live.

It Is Altogether An Extraordinary Growing, Swarming, Glittering, Pushing, Chattering, Good-natured, Cosmopolitan Place, And Perhaps In Some Ways The Best Imitation Of Paris That Can Be Found (with A Great Originality Of Its Own).

Experience Was To Be Taken As Showing That One Might Get A Five-pound Note As One Got A Light For A Cigarette; But One Had To Check The Friendly Impulse To Ask For It In The Same Way.

She Had A Certain Way Of Looking At Life Which He Took As A Personal Offense.

The Faculty Of Attention Has Utterly Vanished From The Anglo-saxon Mind, Extinguished At Its Source By The Big Bayad?re Of Journalism, Of The Newspaper And The Picture Magazine Which Keeps Screaming, "look At Me." Illustrations, Loud Simplifications... Bill Poster Advertising ? Only These Stand A Chance.

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.

Do You Think It Is Better To Be Clever Than To Be Good?” “good For What?” Asked The Doctor. “you Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

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!

It Is Indeed Immensely Picturesque. I Can Fancy Sitting All A Summer's Day Watching Its Shadows Shorten And Lengthen Again, And Drawing A Delicious Contrast Between The World's Duration And The Feeble Span Of Individual Experience. There Is Something In Stonehenge Almost Reassuring; And If You Are Disposed To Feel That Life Is Rather A Superficial Matter, And That We Soon Get To The Bottom Of Things, The Immemorial Gray Pillars May Serve To Remind You Of The Enormous Background Of Time.

It's A Complex Fate, Being An American, And One Of The Responsibilities It Entails Is Fighting Against A Superstitious Valuation Of Europe.

Really, Universally, Relations Stop Nowhere, And The Exquisite Problem Of The Artist Is Eternally But To Draw, By A Geometry Of His Own, The Circle Within Which They Shall Happily Appear To Do So.

The Visible World Is But Man Turned Inside Out That He May Be Revealed To Himself.

Until You Try, You Don't Know What You Can't Do.

Little By Little, Even With Other Cares, The Slowly But Surely Working Poison Of The Garden-mania Begins To Stir In My Long-sluggish Veins.

Americans Will Eat Garbage Provided You Sprinkle It Liberally With Ketchup.

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!

The Historian, Essentially, Wants More Documents Than He Can Really Use; The Dramatist Only Wants More Liberties Than He Can Really Take.

What Is Either A Picture Or A Novel That Is Not Character?

Don't Pass It By - The Immediate, The Real, The Ours, The Yours, The Novelist's That It Waits For.

Life Being All Inclusion And Confusion, And Art Being All Discrimination And Selection, The Latter, In Search Of The Hard Latent Value With Which It Alone Is Concerned, Sniffs Round The Mass As Instinctively And Unerringly As A Dog Suspicious Of Some Buried Bone.

An Englishman's Never So Natural As When He's Holding His Tongue.

London Doesn't Love The Latent Or The Lurking, Has Neither Time, Nor Taste, Nor Sense For Anything Less Discernible Than The Red Flag In Front Of The Steam-roller. It Wants Cash Over The Counter And Letters Ten Feet High.

I Recall This Passage As The Hour Of Its First Fully Coming Over Me That She Was A Beautiful Liberal Creature. I Had Seen Her Personality In Glimpses And Gleams, Like A Song Sung In Snatches, But Now It Was Before Me In A Large Rosy Glow, As If It Had Been A Full Volume Of Sound. I Heard The Whole Of The Air, And It Was Sweet Fresh Music, Which I Was Often To Hum Over.(sir Edmund Orme)

I Intend To Judge Things For Myself; To Judge Wrongly, I Think, Is More Honorable Than Not To Judge At All.

The Effort Really To See And Really To Represent Is No Idle Business In Face Of The Constant Force That Makes For Muddlement. The Great Thing Is Indeed That The Muddled State Too Is One Of The Very Sharpest Of The Realities, That It Also Has Color And Form And Character, Has Often In Fact A Broad And Rich Comicality.

Though There Are Some Disagreeable Things In Venice There Is Nothing So Disagreeable As The Visitors.

People Talk About The Conscience, But It Seems To Me One Must Just Bring It Up To A Certain Point And Leave It There. You Can Let Your Conscience Alone If You're Nice To The Second Housemaid.

My Idea Is This, That When You Only Love A Little You're Naturally Not Jealous — Or Are Only Jealous Also A Little, So That It Doesn't Matter. But When You Love In A Deeper And Intenser Way, Then You're In The Very Same Proportion Jealous; Your Jealousy Has Intensity And, No Doubt, Ferocity.

Of Course You're Always At Liberty To Judge The Critic. Judge People As Critics, However, And You'll Condemn Them All!

It Was The Way The Autumn Day Looked Into The High Windows As It Waned; The Way The Red Light, Breaking At The Close From Under A Low Sombre Sky, Reached Out In A Long Shaft And Played Over Old Wainscots, Old Tapestry, Old Gold, Old Colour.

One Can't Judge Till One's Forty; Before That We're Too Eager, Too Hard, Too Cruel, And In Addition Much Too Ignorant.

I Hate American Simplicity. I Glory In The Piling Up Of Complications Of Every Sort. If I Could Pronounce The Name James In Any Different Or More Elaborate Way I Should Be In Favor Of Doing It.

Am I Solemn? I Had An Idea I Was Grinning From Ear To Ear." "you Look As If You Were Taking Me To A Prayer-meeting Or A Funeral. If That's A Grin Your Ears Are Very Near Together." "should You Like Me To Dance A Hornpipe On The Deck?" "pray Do, And I'll Carry Round Your Hat. It'll Pay The Expenses Of Our Journey.

Cats And Monkeys; Monkeys And Cats; All Human Life Is There.

If You Have Work To Do, Don't Wait To Feel Like It; Set To Work And You Will Feel Like It.

If You Haven't Had Your Life What Have You Had?

I Have In My Own Fashion Learned The Lesson That Life Is Effort, Unremittingly Repeated.

To Say That She Had A Book Is To Say That Her Solitude Did Not Press Upon Her; For Her Love Of Knowledge Had A Fertilizing Quality And Her Imagination Was Strong. There Was At This Time, However, A Want Of Lightness In Her Situation, Which The Arrival Of An Unexpected Visitor Did Much To Dispel.

The "germ," Wherever Gathered, Has Ever Been For Me, "the Germ Of A Story," And Most Of The Stories Strained To Shape Under My Hand Have Sprung From A Single Small Seed, A Seed As Remote And Windblown As A Casual Hint.

I Don't Care About Anything But You, And That's Enough For The Present. I Want You To Be Happy--not To Think Of Anything Sad; Only To Feel That I'm Near You And I Love You. Why Should There Be Pain? In Such Hours As This What Have We To Do With Pain? That's Not The Deepest Thing; There's Something Deeper.

You Are Good For Nothing Unless You Are Clever.

In Museums And Palaces We Are Alternate Radicals And Conservatives.

Don't Try So Much To Form Your Character - It's Like Trying To Pull Open A Tight, Tender Young Rose. Live As You Like Best And Your Character Will Take Care Of Itself.

There Are Women Who Are For All Your 'times Of Life.' They're The Most Wonderful Sort.

He Is The Same Old Sausage, Fizzing And Sputtering In His Own Grease.

...and The Great Advantage Of Being A Literary Woman, Was That You Could Go Everywhere And Do Everything.

Art Is A Point Of View, And A Genius Way Of Looking At Things.

Experience Is Never Limited, And It Is Never Complete; It Is An Immense Sensibility, A Kind Of Huge Spider-web Of The Finest Silken Threads Suspended In The Chamber Of Consciousness, And Catching Every Air-borne Particle In Its Tissue.

One Doesn't Defend One's God: One's God Is In Himself A Defense.

You Seemed To Me To Be Soaring Far Up In The Blue - To Be Sailing In The Bright Light, Over The Heads Of Men. Suddenly Some One Tosses Up A Faded Rosebud - A Missile That Should Never Have Reached You - And Down You Drop To The Ground.

Try To Be One Of The People On Whom Nothing Is Lost!

I Have Performed The Necessary Butchery. Here Is The Bleeding Corpse.

The Deepest Quality Of A Work Of Art Will Always Be The Quality Of The Mind Of The Producer...no Good Novel Will Ever Proceed From A Superficial Mind.

Never Say You Know The Last Word About Any Human Heart.

Adjectives Are The Sugar Of Literature And Adverbs The Salt.

One Is Oneself A Fine Consequence.

However British You May Be, I Am More British Still.

In Art Economy Is Always Beauty.

I Adore Adverbs; They Are The Only Qualifications I Really Much Respect.

Ideas Are, In Truth, Forces. Infinite, Too, Is The Power Of Personality. A Union Of The Two Always Makes History.

The House Of Fiction Has In Short Not One Window, But A Million, ... But They Are, Singly, As Nothing Without The Posted Presence Of The Watcher.

It's Never Permitted To Be Surprised At The Aberrations Of Born Fools.

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.

Deep Experience Is Never Peaceful.

True Happiness, We Are Told, Consists In Getting Out Of One's Self; But The Point Is Not Only To Get Out - You Must Stay Out; And To Stay Out You Must Have Some Absorbing Errand.

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.

When You Forget To Eat, You Know You're Alive.

Ignorance Is Bliss

She Carried Within Herself A Great Fund Of Life, And Her Deepest Enjoyment Was To Feel The Continuity Between The Movement Of Her Own Heart And The Agitations Of The World. For This Reason, She Was Fond Of Seeing Great Crowds, And Large Stretches Of Country, Of Reading About Revolutions And Wars, Of Looking At Historical Pictures--a Class Of Efforts To Which She Had Often Gone So Far As To Forgive Much Bad Painting For The Sake Of The Subject.

If One Is Strong, One Loves The More Strongly.

The Women One Meets - What Are They But Books One Has Already Read? You're A Library Of The Unknown, The Uncut. Upon My Word I've A Subscription.

We Must Grant The Artist His Subject, His Idea, His Donn´e: Our Criticism Is Applied Only To What He Makes Of It.

Criticism Talks A Good Deal Of Nonsense, But Even Its Nonsense Is A Useful Force. It Keeps The Question Of Art Before The World, Insists Upon Its Importance.

To Read Between The Lines Was Easier Than To Follow The Text.

Read Between The Lines

To Believe In A Child Is To Believe In The Future. Through Their Aspirations They Will Save The World. With Their Combined Knowledge The Turbulent Seas Of Hate And Injustice Will Be Calmed.

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 Of The Earth Are In A Conspiracy To Under Value Them.

We Must For Dear Life Make Our Own Counter-realities.

Any Point Of View Is Interesting That Is A Direct Impression Of Life. You Each Have An Impression Colored By Your Individual Conditions; Make That Into A Picture, A Picture Framed By Your Own Personal Wisdom, Your Glimpse Of The American World.

A Swift Carriage, Of A Dark Night, Rattling With Four Horses Over Roads That One Can’t See--that’s My Idea Of Happiness.

She Had Her Own Way Of Doing All That She Did, And This Is The Simplest Description Of A Character Which, Although By No Means Without Liberal Motions, Rarely Succeeded In Giving An Impression Of Suavity.

There Were Always People To Snatch At You, And It Would Never Occur To Them That They Were Eating You Up. They Did That Without Tasting.

Women Never Dine Alone. When They Dine Alone They Don't Dine.

...the Peculiar Air Of Oxford-the Air Of Liberty To Care For The Things Of The Mind Assured And Secured By Machinery Which Is In Itself A Satisfaction To Sense.

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.

The Right Time Is Any Time That One Is Still So Lucky As To Have.

Life Is A Predicament Which Precedes Death.

The Effect, If Not The Prime Office, Of Criticism Is To Make Our Absorption And Our Enjoyment Of The Things That Feed The Mind As Aware Of Itself As Possible, Since That Awareness Quickens The Mental Demand, Which Thus In Turn Wanders Further And Further For Pasture. This Action On The Part Of The Mind Practically Amounts To A Reaching Out For The Reasons Of Its Interest, As Only By Its Ascertaining Them Can The Interest Grow More Various. This Is The Very Education Of Our Imaginative Life.

I Don't Want Everyone To Like Me; I Should Think Less Of Myself If Some People Did.

She Took Refuge On The Firm Ground Of Fiction, Through Which Indeed There Curled The Blue River Of Truth.

[thomas Henry] Huxley Is A Very Genial, Comfortable Being-yet With None Of The Noisy And Windy Geniality Of Some Folks Here, Whom You Find With Their Backs Turned When You Are Responding To The Remarks That They Have Made You.

The Only Success Worth One's Powder Was Success In The Line Of One's Idiosyncrasy... What Was Talent But The Art Of Being Completely Whatever One Happened To Be?

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The Image Of The Presence, Whatever It Was, Waiting There For Him To Go -this Image Had Not Yet Been So Concrete For His Nerves As When He Stopped Short Of The Point At Which Certainty Would Have Come To Him. For, With All His Resolution, Or More Exactly With All His Dread, He Did Stop Short - He Hung Back From Really Seeing. The Risk Was Too Great And His Fear Too Definite: It Took At This Moment An Awful Specific Form.

Be Generous, Be Delicate, And Always Pursue The Prize.

Everything About Florence Seems To Be Colored With A Mild Violet, Like Diluted Wine.

You Must Save What You Can Of Your Life; You Musn't Lose It All Simply Because You've Lost A Part.

Under Certain Circumstances There Are Few Hours In Life More Agreeable Than The Hour Dedicated To The Ceremony Known As Afternoon Tea.

A Man Who Pretends To Understand Women Is Bad Manners. For Him To Really To Understand Them Is Bad Morals.

If We Pretend To Respect The Artist At All We Must Allow Him His Freedom Of Choice , In The Face, In Particular Cases, Of Innumerable Presumptions That The Choice Will Not Fructify.

Sorrow Comes In Great Waves...but Rolls Over Us, And Though It May Almost Smother Us, It Leaves Us. And We Know That If It Is Strong, We Are Stronger, Inasmuch As It Passes And We Remain.

She Is Written In A Foreign Tongue.

It Is Art That Makes Life, Makes Interest, Makes Importance.

There Were Several Ways Of Understanding Her: There Was What She Said, And There Was What She Meant, And There Was Something Between The Two, That Was Neither.

He Was There Or Was Not There: Not There If I Didn't See Him.

I Could Come Back To America..to Die..but Never, Never To Live.

I'm Yours For Ever--for Ever And Ever. Here I Stand; I'm As Firm As A Rock. If You'll Only Trust Me, How Little You'll Be Disappointed. Be Mine As I Am Yours.

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.

I Have Lived Too Long In Foreign Parts

The Girl Had A Certain Nobleness Of Imagination, Which Rendered Her A Good Many Services And Played Her A Great Many Tricks. She Spent Half Her Time In Thinking Of Beauty, Bravery, Magnanimity; She Had A Fixed Determination To Regard The World As A Place Of Brightness, Of Free Expansion, Of Irresistible Action, She Thought It Would Be Detestable To Be Afraid Or Ashamed. She Had An Infinite Hope That She Would Never Do Anything Wrong. She Had Resented So Strongly, After Discovering Them, Her Mere Errors Of Feeling.

The Artist Is Present In Every Page Of Every Book From Which He Sought So Assiduously To Eliminate Himself.

That Accurst Autobiographic Form Which Puts A Premium On The Loose, The Improvised, The Cheap, And The Easy.

One Of My Latest Sensations Was Going To Lady Airlie's To Hear Browning Read His Own Poems - With The Comport Of Finding That, At Least, If You Don't Understand Them, He Himself Apparently Understands Them Even Less. He Read Them As If He Hated Them And Would Like To Bite Them To Pieces.

You Think Too Much.' 'i Suppose I Do; But I Can’t Help It, My Mind Is So Terribly Active. When I Give Myself, I Give Myself. I Pay The Penalty In My Headaches, My Famous Headaches--a Perfect Circlet Of Pain! But I Carry It As A Queen Carries Her Crown.

I Don't Care Anything About Reasons, But I Know What I Like.

To Live Only To Suffer—only To Feel The Injury Of Life Repeated And Enlarged—it Seemed To Her She Was Too Valuable, Too Capable, For That. Then She Wondered If It Were Vain And Stupid To Think So Well Of Herself. When Had It Even Been A Guarantee To Be Valuable? Wasn't All History Full Of The Destruction Of Precious Things? Wasn't It Much More Probable That If One Were Fine One Would Suffer?

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.

She Envied Ralph His Dying, For If One Were Thinking Of Rest That Was The Most Perfect Of All. To Cease Utterly, To Give It All Up And Not Know Anything More — This Idea Was As Sweet As The Vision Of A Cool Bath In A Marble Tank, In A Darkened Chamber, In A Hot Land.

To Live In The World Of Creation-to Get Into It And Stay In It-to Frequent It And Haunt It...to Think Intently And Fruitfully, To Woo Combinations And Inspirations Into Being By A Depth And Continuity Of Attention And Meditation-this Is The Only Thing.

We Work In The Dark -- We Do What We Can -- We Give What We Have.

The Black And Merciless Things That Are Behind The Great Possessions.

Do Not Mind Anything That Anyone Tells You About Anyone Else. Judge Everyone And Everything For Yourself.

She Feels In Italics And Thinks In Capitals.

The Story Had Held Us, Round The Fire, Sufficiently Breathless, But Except The Obvious Remark That It Was Gruesome, As, On Christmas Eve In An Old House, A Strange Tale Should Essentially Be . . .

The Only Reason For The Existence Of A Novel Is That It Does Attempt To Represent Life.

When I Am Wicked I Am In High Spirits.

There Are Two Kinds Of Taste, The Taste For Emotions Of Surprise And The Taste For Emotions Of Recognition.

Art Is Nothing More Than The Shadow Of Humanity.

Inspirational Running

The Only Obligation To Which In Advance We May Hold A Novel, Without Incurring The Accusation Of Being Arbitrary, Is That It Be Interesting.

We Trust To Novels To Train Us In The Practice Of Great Indignations And Great Generosity.

Things Are Always Different Than What They Might Be...if You Wait For Them To Change, You Will Never Do Anything.

..her Smile, Which Was Her Pretty Feature, Was Never So Pretty As When Her Sprightly Phrase Had A Scratch Lurking In It.

Oxford Lends Sweetness To Labour And Dignity To Leisure.

Art Without Life Is A Poor Affair.

She Had Always Been Fond Of History, And Here [in Rome] Was History In The Stones Of The Street And The Atoms Of The Sunshine.

London Is On The Whole The Most Possible Form Of Life.

The Girl Had A Certain Nobleness Of Imagination, Which Rendered Her A Good Many Services And Played Her A Great Many Tricks.

Life Is, In Fact, A Battle. Evil Is Insolent And Strong; Beauty Enchanting, But Rare; Goodness Very Apt To Be Weak; Folly Very Apt To Be Defiant; Wickedness To Carry The Day; Imbeciles To Be In Great Places, People Of Sense In Small, And Mankind Generally Unhappy. But The World As It Stands Is No Narrow Illusion, No Phantasm, No Evil Dream Of The Night; We Wake Up To It, Forever And Ever; And We Can Neither Forget It Nor Deny It Nor Dispense With It.

Art Does Not Lie In Copying Nature.- Nature Furnishes The Material By Means Of Which Is To Express A Beauty Still Unexpressed In Nature.-the Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Is Conscious Of.

He Is Outside Of Everything, And Alien Everywhere. He Is An Aesthetic Solitary. His Beautiful, Light Imagination Is The Wing That On The Autumn Evening Just Brushes The Dusky Window.

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.

I Know Of No Substitute Whatever For The Force And Beauty Of An Artistic Process.

I Always Want To Know The Things One Shouldn't Do." "so As To Do Them?" Asked Her Aunt. "so As To Choose." Said Isabel

There's No More Usual Basis Of Union Than Mutual Misunderstanding.

It Takes An Endless Amount Of History To Make Even A Little Tradition.

No Themes Are So Human As Those That Reflect For Us, Out Of The Confusion Of Life, The Close Connection Of Bliss And Bale, Of The Things That Help With The Things That Hurt, So Dangling Before Us Forever That Bright Hard Medal, Of So Strange An Alloy, One Face Of Which Is Somebody's Right And Ease And The Other Somebody's Pain And Wrong.

She Had An Immense Curiosity About Life, And Was Constantly Staring And Wondering.

Her Reputation For Reading A Great Deal Hung About Her Like The Cloudy Envelope Of A Goddess In An Epic.

...the Great Merit Of The Place Is That One Can Arrange One's Life Here Exactly As One Pleases...there Are Facilities For Every Kind Of Habit And Taste, And Everything Is Accepted And Understood.

You Wanted To Look At Life For Yourself - But You Were Not Allowed; You Were Punished For Your Wish. You Were Ground In The Very Mill Of The Conventional.

All Intimacies Are Based On Differences.

I Think Patriotism Is Like Charity -- It Begins At Home.

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.

The Main Object Of The Novel Is To Represent Life. . .the Success Of A Work Of Art, To My Mind, May Be Measured By The Degree To Which It Produces A Certain Illusion; That Illusion Makes It Appear To Us For The Time That We Have Lived Another Life - That We Have Had A Miraculous Enlargement Of Experience.

I've Struck Up A Tremendous Intimacy With Conte Alberto, And We Literally Can't Live Without Each Other. He Is The First Object My Eyes Greet In The Morning, And The Last At Night.

Art Derives A Considerable Part Of Its Beneficial Exercise From Flying In The Face Of Presumptions.

I Have Only To Let Myself Go! So I Have Said All My Life, Yet I Have Never Fully Done It.

The Artist Beholds In Nature More Than She Herself Nature Is Conscious Of.

My Father Ain't In Europe; My Father's In A Better Place Than Europe." Winterbourne Imagined For A Moment That This Was The Manner In Which The Child Had Been Taught To Intimate That Mr. Miller Had Been Removed To The Sphere Of Celestial Reward. But Randolph Immediately Added, "my Father's In Schenectady.

I Would Give All I Possess To Get Out Of Myself; But Somehow, At The End, I Find Myself So Vastly More Interesting Than Nine Tenths Of The People I Meet.

Don’t Underestimate The Value Of Irony—it Is Extremely Valuable.

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