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

“I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.”
― 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

“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 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

“Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.”
― 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

“It's you who draw me out. I exist in you. Not in others.”
― 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

“I think I could die without its being noticed.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: "I engage myself to you forever."

The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing—couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my 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

“That had been the real beginning—the beginning of everything else.”
― 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

“His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove