Henry James Quotes About Effort

Quotes about: Effort

• I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

  Henry James

  Struggle, Effort, Needs

  Henry James, F. O. Matthiessen, Kenneth B. Murdock (1981). “The Notebooks of Henry James”, p.179, University of Chicago Press

• She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.

  Henry James

  Country, War, Reading

  Henry James (1882). “The portrait of a lady”

• I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.

  Henry James

  Fashion, Effort, Lessons

  Henry James, Leon Edel “Letters”, Harvard University Press

• The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.

  Henry James

  Character, Reality, Color

  Henry James (1979). “What Maisie Knew: In the Cage - The Pupil”, Augustus m Kelley Pubs

• It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

  Henry James

  Poetry, Effort, Mind

  Henry James (2003). “The Portable Henry James”, p.405, Penguin

• The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he may attempt as an executant - no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.

  Henry James

  Responsibility, Discovery, Luxury

  Henry James, William Veeder, Susan M. Griffin (1986). “The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction”, p.170, University of Chicago Press

• If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

  Henry James

  Ambition, Artist, Essence

  Henry James (1984). “Literary Criticism: French writers. Other European writers. The prefaces to the New York edition”, p.414, Library of America

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