The Turn of the Screw Quotes

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“—his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I was a screen-- I was their protector. The more I saw, the less they would.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“...he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss...”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy spirit, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Was n't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream?”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it."
"For sheer terror?" I remember asking.
He seemed to say it was not so simple as that; to be really at a loss how to qualify it. He passed his hand over his eyes, made a little wincing grimace. "For dreadful — dreadfulness!"
"Oh, how delicious!" cried one of the women.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I call it relief, though it was only the relief that a snap brings to a strain or the burst of a thunderstorm to a day of suffocation. It was at least change, and it came with a rush.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“She absolutely declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or nine-times-nine.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“To gaze into the depths of blue of the child's eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgment and, so far as might be, my agitation.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“Oh, it was a trap — not designed but deep — to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever in me was most excitable.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspense - it was superseded by horrible proofs.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

“I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly—last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw