Quote #21

There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

More from Henry James

  1. Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
  2. A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.
  3. I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
  4. If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid?…
  5. She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.
  6. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived - to dig deep into the actual and get something out…
  7. Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devo…
  8. The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

All Henry James quotes