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Quotes from Prefaces — Henry James

1843–1916 United States

← All quotes by Henry James

10 quotes

The note I wanted; that of the strange and sinister embroidered on the very type of the normal and easy.

Prefaces (1909)

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

Prefaces (1907)

The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.

Prefaces (1907)

The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"

Prefaces (1907)

The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.

Prefaces (1907)

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

Prefaces (1907)

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

Prefaces (1907)

In art economy is always beauty.

Prefaces (1907)

Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.

Prefaces (1907)

The fatal futility of Fact.

Prefaces (1907)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henry James (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.