Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic. |
But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors. |
Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above. |
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title |
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title |
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. |
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. |
For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. |
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. |
For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected. |
For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? |
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. |
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that |
How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I meant, what is the reality of any feeling? |
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue |