Quotes from The Portrait of a Lady

“It has made me better loving you... it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose." said Isabel”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“She was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts, and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar...It may be affirmed without delay that She was probably very liable to the sin of self-esteem; she often surveyed with complacency the field of her own nature; she was in the habit of taking for granted, on scanty evidence, that she was right; impulsively, she often admired herself...Every now and then she found out she was wrong, and then she treated herself to a week of passionate humility. After this she held her head higher than ever again; for it was of no use, she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself. She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization, should move in the realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“...and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it--to make any sort of success in it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very ready to do; but there's another thing that's still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“I don’t think I pity her. She doesn’t strike me as a girl that suggests compassion. I think I envy her... I don’t know whether she is a gifted being, but she is a clever girl, with a strong will and a high temper. She has no idea of being bored...Very pretty indeed; but I don’t insist upon that. It’s her general air of being someone in particular that strikes me.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“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, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“...It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one’s mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her; for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“...he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.”
― Henry James, quote from The Portrait of a Lady

About the author

Popular quotes

“Shea Chapter 1 Theodore Boone was an only child and for that reason usually had breakfast alone. His father, a busy lawyer, was in the habit of leaving early and meeting friends for coffee and gossip at the same downtown diner every morning at seven. Theo’s mother, herself a busy lawyer, had been trying to lose ten pounds for at least the past ten years, and because of this she’d convinced herself that breakfast should be nothing more than coffee with the newspaper. So he ate by himself at the kitchen table, cold cereal and orange juice, with an eye on the clock. The Boone home had clocks everywhere, clear evidence of organized people. Actually, he wasn’t completely alone. Beside his chair, his dog ate, too. Judge was a thoroughly mixed mutt whose age and breeding would always be a mystery. Theo had rescued him from near death with a last-second appearance in Animal Court two years earlier, and Judge would always be grateful. He preferred Cheerios, same as Theo, and they ate together in silence every morning. At 8:00 a.m., Theo rinsed their bowls in the sink, placed the milk and juice back in the fridge, walked to the den, and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Off to school,” he said. “Do you have lunch money?” she asked, the same question five mornings a week. “Always.” “And”
― John Grisham, quote from Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer

“Leeper, a ten-time loser. Distant cousin to May Finnemore, even more distant to April. He grew up around here, drifted away a long time ago, became a career thug, petty thief, drug dealer, and so on. Got busted in California for kidnapping ten years ago, sentenced to life with no parole. Escaped two weeks ago. This afternoon we get a tip that he might be in this area.” Theo looked at the sinister face of Jack Leeper and felt ill. If this thug had April, then she was in serious trouble. Bolick continued, “Last night around seven thirty, Leeper here walks into the Korean Quick Shop four blocks away, buys cigarettes and beer, gets his face captured on the surveillance cameras. Not the smartest crook in the world. So, we know he’s definitely in the area.” “Why would he take April?” Theo blurted, his mouth dry with fear, his knees ready to buckle. “According to authorities in California, they found some letters from April in his prison cell. She was his pen pal, probably felt sorry for the guy ’cause he’s never supposed to get out of prison. So she strikes up a correspondence. We’ve”
― John Grisham, quote from The Abduction

“I recall thinking that I was stroking toward either the end of all life or the beginning of a new one. Neither possibility stirred me. Every man knows he will die; and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of sane being. I wasn't able to credit my own non-existence any better than the next man; what I had lost was a healthy abhorrence of the state. It had not dropped from me because of any particular shock or misfortune. It had moulted from me year by year, for all of my thirty-five, to leave me naked in apathy.”
― John Myers Myers, quote from Silverlock

“Our faith in victory had been unquestioning, its opposite, defeat, had no currency among us. Victory was possible, that was all. It would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory. So here came the disturbing Hoosier, displaying the other side of the coin, showing us defeat. It shook us. And it was from this moment that we dated the feeling of what is called expendability. All armies have expendable items, that is, a part or unit the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand, or in extremity his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field either in peace or in war without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men. Men are the most expendable of all. Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor all of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability. This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt, that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice, that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the roll of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham, entirely without reproach yet, for the same master he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is full of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one victim. If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without extenuating it.”
― Robert Leckie, quote from Helmet for My Pillow

“And so I make my way across the room steadily, carefully. Hands shaking, I pull the string, lifting my blinds. They rise slowly, drawing more moonlight into the room with every inch
And there he is, crouched low on the roof. Same leather jacket. The hair is his, the cheekbones, the perfect nose . . . the eyes: dark and mysterious . . . full of secrets. . . . My heart flutters, body light. I reach out to touch him, thinking he might disappear, my fingers disrupted by the windowpane.
On the other side, Parker lifts his hand and mouths:
“Hi.”
I mouth “Hi” back.
He holds up a single finger, signalling me to hold on. He picks up a spiral-bound notebook and flips open the cover, turning the first page to me. I recognize his neat, block print instantly: bold, black Sharpie. I know this is unexpected . . . , I read. He flips the page.
. . . and strange . . .
I lift an eyebrow.
. . . but please hear read me out.
He flips to the next page.
I know I told you I never lied . . .
. . . but that was (obviously) the biggest lie of all. The truth is: I’m a liar.
I lied.
I lied to myself . . .
. . . and to you.
Parker watches as I read. Our eyes meet, and he flips the page.
But only because I had to.
I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you, Jaden . . .
. . . but it happened anyway.
I clear my throat, and swallow hard, but it’s squeezed shut again, tight.
And it gets worse.
Not only am I a liar . . .
I’m selfish.
Selfish enough to want it all.
And I know if I don’t have you . . .
I hold my breath, waiting.
. . . I don’t have anything.
He turns another page, and I read:
I’m not Parker . . .
. . . and I’m not going to give up . . .
. . . until I can prove to you . . .
. . . that you are the only thing that matters. He flips to the next page.
So keep sending me away . . .
. . . but I’ll just keep coming back to you. Again . . .
He flips to the next page.
. . . and again . . .
And the next:
. . . and again.
Goose bumps rise to the surface of my skin. I shiver, hugging myself tightly.
And if you can ever find it in your (heart) to forgive me . . .
There’s a big, black “heart” symbol where the word should be.
I will do everything it takes to make it up to you. He closes the notebook and tosses it beside him. It lands on the roof with a dull thwack. Then, lifting his index finger, he draws an X across his chest. Cross my heart.
I stifle the happy laugh welling inside, hiding the smile as I reach for the metal latch to unlock my window. I slowly, carefully, raise the sash. A burst of fresh honeysuckles saturates the balmy, midnight air, sickeningly sweet, filling the room. I close my eyes, breathing it in, as a thousand sleepless nights melt, slipping away. I gather the lavender satin of my dress in my hand, climb through the open window, and stand tall on the roof, feeling the height, the warmth of the shingles beneath my bare feet, facing Parker. He touches the length of the scar on my forehead with his cool finger, tucks my hair behind my ear, traces the edge of my face with the back of his hand. My eyes close.
“You know you’re beautiful? Even when you cry?”
He smiles, holding my face in his hands, smearing the tears away with his thumbs.
I breathe in, lungs shuddering.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, black eyes sincere. I swallow. “I know why you had to.”
“Doesn’t make it right.”
“Doesn’t matter anymore,” I say, shaking my head. The moon hangs suspended in the sky, stars twinkling overhead, as he leans down and kisses me softly, lips meeting mine, familiar—lips I imagined, dreamed about, memorized a mil ion hours ago. Then he wraps his arms around me, pulling me into him, quelling every doubt and fear and uncertainty in this one, perfect moment.”
― Katie Klein, quote from Cross My Heart

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