101 quotes
He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
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.
The Turn of the Screw (1898)
You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!
To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
The Art of Fiction (1884)
The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.
The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
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.
Roderick Hudson (1875)
If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.
The Art of Fiction (1884)
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
The Awkward Age (1899)
It is nothing against the validity of a friendship that the parties to it have not a mutual resemblance. There must be a basis of agreement, but the structure reared upon it may contain a thousand disparities.
Confidence (1879)
She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
There are few things more exciting to me, in short, than a psychological reason.
The Art of Fiction (1884)
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
The Art of Fiction (1884)
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.
Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.
The Figure in the Carpet (1896)
Cecilia had moreover a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.
Roderick Hudson (1875)