What Maisie Knew Quotes

“She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Everything had something behind it: life was like a long corridor with rows of closed doors.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“What there was no effective record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She had had a real fright but had fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too had been dashed down and broken. It was gone.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what Maisie knew.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She was to feel henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“...there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his vision of her vision. What there was no record of indeed was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy.”
― Henry James Samuel Guntrip, What Maisie Knew

“The mere sense of his grasp in her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain. His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she couldn't see round its edges”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric—strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her—a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and above all of real intimacy”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Reconstructing these things later Maisie theorised that she at this point would have put a question to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her—she could scarcely tell which—come from his suddenly making her feel his arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way he had never yet shown her.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“He smiled down at her, hesitating, looking pleasanter and pleasanter. ‘Let me tell you about your mother.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“We have already learned that she had come to like people’s liking her to ‘know’. Before he could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp. ‘My own child,’ Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next moment she was on her mother’s breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller’s shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected with a push and the brisk injunction: ‘Now go to the Captain!”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Maisie had a sense of her launching the question with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping that Sir Claude would declare that preference. We have already learned that she had come to like people’s liking her to ‘know’. Before he could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp. ‘My own child,’ Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which he had his season-ticket; then she looked again at Sir Claude.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“What are you doing with my daughter?’ she demanded of her husband; in spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than ever in her life before of not being personally noticed.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“The companions confessed to each other the dread each had hidden the worst of, but Mrs Wix was better off than Maisie in having a plan of defence.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“He led one after all in the schoolroom, and there were hours of late evening, when she had gone to bed, that Maisie knew he sat there talking with Mrs Wix of how to meet his difficulties. His consideration for this unfortunate woman even in the midst of them continued to show him as the perfect gentleman and lifted the subject of his courtesy into an upper air of beatitude in which her very pride had the hush of anxiety.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“It is hard for him,’ she often said to her companion; and it was surprising how competent on this point Maisie was conscious of being to agree with her”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“The day came indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept on Mrs Wix’s bosom after hearing that Sir Claude was a butterfly; considering moreover that her governess but half-patched it up in coming out at various moments the next few days with the opinion that it was proper to his ‘station’ to be careless and free.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Maisie was with the idea of the sentiment Sir Claude had inspired, and familiar, in addition, by Mrs Wix’s anecdotes, with the ravages that in general such a sentiment could produce, she was able to make allowances for her ladyship’s remarkable appearance, her violent splendour, the wonderful colour of her lips and even the hard stare, the stare of some gorgeous idol described in a story-book, that had come into her eyes in consequence of a curious thickening of their already rich circumference.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton—not on the morrow of Mrs Wix’s visit, and not, oddly, till several days later—his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a later stage of wedlock.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She looked at her examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears she had kept down at the station. They had nothing—no, distinctly nothing—to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know." "Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've killed it when it had begun to live." She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think I've produced life. I don't know what to call it—I haven't even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever met—it's exquisite, it's sacred.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most?”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“If you knew some of the people he does have!” Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“She felt the moment she looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan’s public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone, she was bored with not having.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew

“Mama doesn't care for me," she said very simply. "Not really." Child as she was, her little long history was in the words.”
― Henry James, What Maisie Knew