Henry James Quotes

“The way certain classes arrogate to themselves the title of the people has never pleased me. Why are some human beings the people, and the people only, and others not? I am of the people myself, I have worked all my days like a knife-grinder, and I have really never changed.”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“She always looks the same: like an angel who came down from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in her first day on earth!”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“I just say this: that I think it’s a great gain, early in life, to know the worst; then we don’t live in a fool’s paradise.”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“He’s a thin-skinned, morbid, mooning little beggar, with a good deal of imagination and not much perseverance, who will expect a good deal more of life than he will find in it. That’s why he won’t be happy.”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mamma?” Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her mother’s appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to her little innocent lips. “He said I was to tell you, from him,” she faithfully reported, “that you’re a nasty horrid pig!”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“They girded their loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel.”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels

“They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything.”
― Henry James, Henry James: The Complete Novels