“Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse”

“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool.”

“But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.”

“We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.”

“James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."(Little Review, 1918)”

“He is quiet and small, he is blackFrom his ears to the tip of his tail;He can creep through the tiniest crackHe can walk on the narrowest rail.He can pick any card from a pack,He is equally cunning with dice;He is always deceiving you into believingThat he's only hunting for mice.He can play any trick with a corkOr a spoon and a bit of fish-paste;If you look for a knife or a forkAnd you think it is merely misplaced -You have seen it one moment, and then it is gawn!But you'll find it next week lying out on the lawn.And we all say: OH!Well I never!Was there everA Cat so cleverAs Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!”

“Yet when we came back, from the hyacinth garden,Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could notSpeak, and my eyes failed, I was neitherLiving nor dead, and I knew nothing.Looking into the heart of light, the silence.Oed und leer das Meer ('waste and empty in the sea')""I rememberThose are pearls that were his eyes.""Who is the third who walks always beside you?When I count, there are only you and I togetherBut when I look ahead, up the white roadThere is always another one walking beside you,Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a womanBut who is that on the other side of you?”