The Princess Casamassima Quotes

“You like excitement and emotion and change, you like remarkable sensations, whereas I go in for a holy calm, for sweet repose.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“I don't care how I live, nor where I live," said Millicent, "so long as I can do as I like.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips -- sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feelings that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief and a kind of solution. Lady Aurora sat down beside him, and laid her finger-tips gently on his hand. So, for a minute, while his tears flowed and she said nothing, he felt her timid, consoling touch. At the end of the minute he raised his head; it came back to him that she had said "we" just before, and he asked her whom she meant.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“But, after all, the opinions of our friends are not what we love them for, and therefore I don't see why they should be what we hate them for.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“Haven't you kept anything?" Hyacinth went on, without heeding this challenge.
She looked at him a moment. "I have kept you!”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“I believe those that are on top the heap are better than those that are under it, that they mean to stay here, and that if they are not a pack of poltroons they will.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“I am convinced that we are living in a fool's paradise, that the ground is heaving under our feet."
"It's not the ground my dear; it's you that are turning somersaults," Madame Grandoni interposed.
"Ah, you, my friend, you have the happy faculty of believing what you like to believe. I have to believe what I see.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“This appeared to impress her, and she branched off to remark, with an irrelevance that characterised her, that she didn't care anything about a man's family if she liked the man himself; she thought families were played out.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“She wondered why a prison should have such an evil face if it was erected in the interest of justice and order–an expression of the righteous forces of society.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima

“If a few more people felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should see the begininng of the dance.”
― Henry James, The Princess Casamassima