The Middle Years Quotes

“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.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. 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.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“Το βιβλίο που κρατούσε ήταν μυθιστόρημα· είχε εξώφυλλο σχεδιασμένο για να τραβάει το μάτι, κι ενώ το ρομάντσο της αληθινής ζωής στεκόταν δίπλα του παραμελημένο, αυτός βυθιζόταν σ' εκείνο μιας δανειστικής βιβλιοθήκης.”
― Henry James, Η δεύτερη ευκαιρία

“Could one in those days feel anything with force, whether for pleasure or for pain, without feeling it as an immense little act or event of life, and as therefore taking place on a scene and in circumstances scarce at all to be separated from its own sense and impact?—so that to recover it is to recover the whole medium, the material pressure of things, and find it most marked for preservation as an aspect, even, distinguishably, a "composition.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“There isn't a thing I can imagine having missed that I don't quite ache to miss again; and it remains at all events an odd stroke that, having of old most felt the thrill of the place in its mighty muchness, I have lived to adore it backward for its sweet simplicity.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“Didn't I see that humour itself, which might seem elsewhere corrosive and subversive, was, as an English faculty, turned outward altogether and never turned inward?—by which convenient circumstance subversion, or in other words alteration and variation were not promoted. Such truths were wondrous things to make out in such connections as my experience was then, and for no small time after, to be confined to; but I positively catch myself listening to them, even with my half-awakened ears, as if they had been all so many sermons of the very stones of London.”
― Henry James, The Middle Years

“Η άβυσσος της ανθρώπινης αυταπάτης, αυτό ήταν το αληθινό, το ακλόνητο βάθος.”
― Henry James, Η δεύτερη ευκαιρία