Henry James

“Her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality. Behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better.Adina is a strange child; she is fanciful without being capricious.She was stout and fresh-coloured, she laughed and talked rather loud, and generally, in galleries and temples, caused a good many stiff British necks to turn round.She had a mania for excursions, and at Frascati and Tivoli she inflicted her good-humoured ponderosity on diminutive donkeys with a relish which seemed to prove that a passion for scenery, like all our passions, is capable of making the best of us pitiless. Adina may not have the shoulders of the Venus of Milo...but I hope it will take more than a bauble like this to make her stoop.Adina espied the first violet of the year glimmering at the root of a cypress. She made haste to rise and gather it, and then wandered further, in the hope of giving it a few companions. Scrope sat and watched her as she moved slowly away, trailing her long shadow on the grass and drooping her head from side to side in her charming quest. It was not, I know, that he felt no impulse to join her; but that he was in love, for the moment, with looking at her from where he sat. Her search carried her some distance and at last she passed out of sight behind a bend in the villa wall.I don't pretend to be sure that I was particularly struck, from this time forward, with something strange in our quiet Adina. She had always seemed to me vaguely, innocently strange; it was part of her charm that in the daily noiseless movement of her life a mystic undertone seemed to murmur "You don't half know me! Perhaps we three prosaic mortals were not quite worthy to know her: yet I believe that if a practised man of the world had whispered to me, one day, over his wine, after Miss Waddington had rustled away from the table, that there was a young lady who, sooner or later, would treat her friends to a first class surprise, I should have laid my finger on his sleeve and told him with a smile that he phrased my own thought. .."That beautiful girl," I said, "seems to me agitated and preoccupied.""That beautiful girl is a puzzle. I don't know what's the matter with her; it's all very painful; she's a very strange creature. I never dreamed there was an obstacle to our happiness--to our union. She has never protested and promised; it's not her way, nor her nature; she is always humble, passive, gentle; but always extremely grateful for every sign of tenderness. Till within three or four days ago, she seemed to me more so than ever; her habitual gentleness took the form of a sort of shrinking, almost suffering, deprecation of my attentions, my petits soins, my lovers nonsense. It was as if they oppressed and mortified her--and she would have liked me to bear more lightly. I did not see directly that it was not the excess of my devotion, but my devotion itself--the very fact of my love and her engagement that pained her. When I did it was a blow in the face. I don't know what under heaven I've done! Women are fathomless creatures. And yet Adina is not capricious, in the common sense....So these are peines d'amour?" he went on, after brooding a moment. "I didn't know how fiercely I was in love!" Scrope stood staring at her as she thrust out the crumpled note: that she meant that Adina--that Adina had left us in the night--was too large a horror for his unprepared sense...."Good-bye to everything! Think me crazy if you will. I could never explain. Only forget me and believe that I am happy, happy, happy! Adina Beati."...Love is said to be par excellence the egotistical passion; if so Adina was far gone. "I can't promise to forget you," I said; "you and my friend here deserve to be remembered!”

“I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.”

“It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.”

“He asked himself whether it could be that he was in love with her, and then hoped he was not; hoped it not so much for his own sake as for that of the amatory passion itself. If this was love, love had been overrated.”

“I'm a perfectly equipped failure. (...) 'Thank goodness you're a failure- it's why I so distinguish you! Anything else to-day is too hideous. Look about you- look at the successes. Would you be one, on your honour?”

“if you are going to be pushed you had better jump”

“Still, who could say what men ever were looking for? They looked for what they found; they knew what pleased them only when they saw it.”

“And if I wavered for the instant it was not with what I kept back.”

“Nothing exceeds the license occasionally taken by the imagination of very rigid people.”

“If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.”

“Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!”

“He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.”

“He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.”

“..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.”

“..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.”

“The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.”

“Cats and monkeys - monkeys and cats - all human life is there!”

“It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.”

“Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.”

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”

“When it's for each other that people give things up theydon't miss them”

“There are no themes so human as those that reflect the closeness of bliss to bale.”

“Oh," said Catherine, with some eagerness, "it doesn't take long to like a person—when once you begin.”

“New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire.”

“He gave a melancholy sigh and stood looking at her a moment, with his hands behind him, giving short nervous shakes to his hunting-crop. “Do you know I’m very much afraid of it – of that remarkable mind of yours?”

“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

“And much addicted to speaking the truth. In her younger years she was a good deal of a romp, and, though it is an awkward confession to make about one's heroine, I must add that she was something of a glutton.”

“... since she might not be splendid, she would at least be immaculate.”

“She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.”

“...the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object.”

“His serenity was but the array of wild flowers niched in his ruin.”

“Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...”

“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. Baudelaire thought him a profound philosopher... Poe was much the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius.”

“The whole of anything, is never told.”

“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”

“Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn't worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots.”

“It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.”

“... was after all a rather mature blossom, such as could be plucked from the stem only by a vigorous jerk.”

“We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.”

“... he escaped all criticism but his own, which was much the most competent and most formidable.”

“They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.”

“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

“Well, I am rather afraid of that visit," said Clifford. "It seems to me it will be rather like going to school again."The Baroness looked at him a moment."My dear child," she said, "there is no agreeable man who has not, at some moment, been to school to a clever woman--probably a little older than himself. And you must be thankful when you get your instructions gratis. With me you would get it gratis.”

“The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight.”

“It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside...".”

“He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.”

“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.”

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”

“Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare.”