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

— Henry James

I am not afraid,” she said; which seemed quite presumptuous enough.“You are not afraid of suffering?”“Yes, I am afraid of suffering. But I am not afraid of ghosts. And I think people suffer too easily,” she added.“I don’t believe you do,” said Ralph, looking at her with his hands in his pockets.”I don’t think that’s a fault,” she answered. “It is not absolutely necessary to suffer; we were not made for that.”“You were not, certainly.”“I am not speaking of myself.” And she turned away a little.“No, it isn’t a fault,” said her cousin. “It’s a merit to be strong.”“Only, if you don’t suffer, they call you hard,” Isabel remarked. They passed out of the smaller drawing-room, into which they had returned from the gallery, and paused in the hall, at the foot of the staircase. Here Ralph presented his companion with her bed-room candle, which he had taken from a niche. “Never mind what they call you,” he said. “When you do suffer, they call you an idiot. The great point is to be as happy as possible.

— Henry James

I don't know why we live—the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about, and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tenderness—remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours, but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see …

— Henry James

I don't need the aid of a clever man to teach me how to live. I can find it out for myself.

— Henry James

.if I don't do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

— Henry James

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

— Henry James

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work, and you will feel like it.

— Henry James

I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.

— Henry James

I have heard many a young unmarried lady exclaim with a bold sweep of conception, “Ah me! I wish I were a widow!” Mrs. Keith was precisely the widow that young unmarried ladies wish to be. With her diamonds in her dressing-case and her carriage in her stable, and without a feather’s weight of encumbrance, she offered a finished example of satisfied ambition.

— Henry James

I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do.

— Henry James