The Patagonia Quotes

“She has been crying here and going on—she has quite upset me.”
― James, Henry, The Patagonia

“The secret of what passed between him and the strange girl who”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“there till we reached Liverpool—I never saw him.  His mother, after a little, at his request, left him alone. ”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn’t make out very well what it conveyed.  Then he bent over his mother, kissing her.  “My news isn’t particularly satisfactory.  I’m going for you.” “Oh you humbug!” she replied.  But she was of course delighted.”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Rush? not in the least.  I take it uncommon easy.” “Ah I’m bound to say you do!” Mrs. Nettlepoint returned with inconsequence.  I guessed at a certain tension between the pair and a want of consideration on the young man’s part, arising perhaps from selfishness.  His mother was nervous, in suspense, wanting to be at rest as to whether she should have his company on the voyage or be obliged to struggle alone.  But as he stood there smiling and slowly moving his fan he struck me somehow as a person on whom this fact wouldn’t sit too heavily.  He was of the type of those whom other people worry about, not of those who worry about other people.  Tall and strong,”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“more charming than that over there, you know!”  She made me very welcome, but her son had told her about the Patagonia, for which she was sorry, as this would mean a longer voyage.  She was a poor creature in any boat and mainly confined to her”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“when she asked where Miss Mavis might be answered that he hadn’t the least idea.  I sat with my friend at her particular request: she told me she knew that if I didn’t Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Gotch would make their approach, so that I must act as a watch-dog.  She was flurried and fatigued with her migration, and I think that Grace Mavis’s choosing this occasion for retirement suggested to her a little that she had been made a fool of.  She remarked that the girl’s not being there showed her for the barbarian she only could be, and that she herself was really very good so to have put herself out; her charge was a mere bore: that was the end of it.  I could see that my companion’s advent”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps, was a foreshortened desert.  The club on the hill alone, from its semi-cylindrical front, projected a glow upon the dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls.  As “every one” was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables.  The heat was insufferable and I thought with”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“getting out to sea.  I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company—that at the eleventh hour an old ship with a lower standard of speed had been put on in place of the vessel in which I had taken my passage.  America was roasting, England might very well be stuffy, and”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. ”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Oh he’ll come back!” I said, glancing at his place.  The repast continued and when it was finished I screwed my chair round to leave the table.  Mrs. Peck performed the same movement and we quitted the saloon”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“speakers responsible.  And then repetition at sea is somehow not repetition; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs—the bells, the meals, the”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“some degree to her loss.  There was an odd pang for me in seeing her move about alone; I felt somehow responsible for it and asked myself why I couldn’t have kept my hands off.  I had seen Jasper in the smoking-room more”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“every one” was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables.  The heat was insufferable”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“The houses were dark in the August night and the perspective of Beacon Street, with its double chain of lamps,”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“was all very interesting.” She continued to look at me.  “You don’t think that,” she then simply stated. “What have I to gain”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“fast ones, if you’re impatient.” She was silent a little after which she brought out: “Oh I guess it’ll be fast enough!”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“impression of having seen me before.  It was not till afterwards that I thought this rather characteristically dull of him.  I drew him far away—I was”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“He would return in half an hour—or in less.  He walked away and I sat there alone, conscious, on the dark dismantled simplified scene, in the deep silence that rests on American towns during the hot season—there was now and then a far cry or a plash in the water, and at intervals the tinkle of the bells of the horse-cars on the long bridge, slow in the suffocating night—of the strange influence, half-sweet, half-sad, that abides in houses uninhabited or about to become so, in places muffled and bereaved, where the unheeded sofas and patient belittered tables seem (like the disconcerted dogs, to whom everything is alike sinister) to recognise the eve of a journey.”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“in the August night and the perspective of Beacon”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Mrs. Nettlepoint stared.  “I couldn’t do that.” On which I was the more amused that I had to explain I was only amused.  “What does it signify now?” “I thought you thought everything signified.  You were so full,” she cried, “of signification!” “Yes, but we’re further out now, and somehow in mid-ocean everything becomes absolute.” “What else can”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“I thought with joy of the morrow,”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“must excuse him—he should have to go back to the club.  He would return in half an hour—or in less.  He walked”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him.”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Absence was a sign that when it might be a question of gratifying him she had grown used to spare no pains, and I fancied her rummaging in some.”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Jasper to her.  I was obliged”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“Mrs. Gotch a wide berth—I couldn’t talk to them.  I could,”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“The Patagonia was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats.  It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature.  We weren’t numerous enough quite to elbow each other and yet weren’t too few to support—with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky.  I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at all; but”
― Henry James, The Patagonia

“on so short an acquaintance remains shut up in his breast.  His mother, I know, went to his door”
― Henry James, The Patagonia