Henry James Quotes on America

5 quotes

  1. The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

  2. It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.

  3. One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

  4. It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them.

  5. If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

All Henry James quotes