Henry James Ideas Quotations

Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey.

We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.

Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.

Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one's self to an idea.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

Ideas are, in truth, force.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re naturally not jealous-or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you’re in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. When however you love in the most abysmal and unutterable way of all – whey then you’re beyond everything, and nothing can pull you down.