Henry James

Feel, feel, I say--feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure.

We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

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.

Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that, this doubtless is the right way to live.

To take what there "is", and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived - to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that - this doubtless is the right way to live.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self, but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

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

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea. New York April 15, 1843 London February 28, 1916