The Wings of the Dove Quotes

“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.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove: Authoritative Text, the Author and the Novel, Criticism

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside...".”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I used to call her, in my stupidity — for want of anything better — a dove”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet—since it was all for tenderness—she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man—that she loves you with passion.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“My dear young lady,' said her distinguished friend, 'isn't "to live" exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common - having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“No,’ she sadly insisted—‘men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"

"Well, at peace with you."

"Oh, 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.

"The peace of having loved."

He raised his eyes to her. "Is that peace?"

"Of having been loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She had had all she wanted.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke, with an ironic smile, of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: 'Oh, the impossible romance—!' The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine, dustless air, where she would hear but the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. 'Ah, not to go down—never, never to go down!' she strangely sighed to her friend.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“When Milly smiled it was a public event—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“It has been everything for me to see you.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“There was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before, at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Life might prove difficult—was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each other, and that was everything.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. ‘My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.’ ‘Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!’ said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: ‘Don’t tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“you mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“there were many things - perhaps even too many - New York could give; but this was felt to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Kuljeskelen täällä. En kyllästy tähän. Eikä minun pitäisikään - tämä sopii minulle niin hyvin. Jumaloin tätä paikkaa. Minulla ei ole pienintäkään halua luopua tästä. -Teistä olisi siis mieluisaa elää täällä?
-Luullakseni minusta olisi mieluisaa kuolla täällä.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were."

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove