Don’t underestimate the value of irony—it is extremely valuable.

— Henry James

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

— Henry James

He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure.

— Henry James

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Mildew had closed, closing them as carefully afterward, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked--oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!--the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric luster which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.

— Henry James

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

— Henry James

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

— Henry James

He was a dim secondary social success -- and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks -- just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of 'hombres chi noises' [French: "shadow play"].

— Henry James

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.

— Henry James

He was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.

— Henry James

However British you may be, I am more British still.

— Henry James