Henry James

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

Of course what he most intensely dreams of is being taken out on walks, and the more you are able to indulge him the more will he adore you and the more all the latent beauty of his nature will come out.

I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.

She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.

Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

Her chief dread in life, at this period of her development, was that she would appear narrow minded; what she feared next afterwards was that she should be so.

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.