Quotes from The Wings of the Dove

“The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“I used to call her, in my stupidity — for want of anything better — a dove”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“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...".”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“No,’ she sadly insisted—‘men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“When Milly smiled it was a public event—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. ‘I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“SHE COULDN’T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm—or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left. There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“His secretary of many years’ standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being ‘fine’.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. ‘My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.’ ‘Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!’ said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: ‘Don’t tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“What’s a man,’ she pursued, ‘especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.’ ‘They would uncommonly suit you,’ he frankly returned. ‘Oh yes, I see myself!”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would end with a sort of meaning.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“The chance had come - it was an extraordinary one - on the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common - having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

“under the long and discurtained ordeal of the morrow’s dawn, that”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove

About the author

Popular quotes

“Dear ignoramuses,

Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance.

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.

Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.”
― Jenny Colgan, quote from Welcome to Rosie Hopkins' Sweet Shop of Dreams

“I never really know the protocol for this kind of situation. It's like when you're in line at a store, and a grandma starts telling you all about her grandchildren or her arthritis, and you smile and nod along. But then it's your turn to check out, so you're just like okay, well, good-bye forever.”
― Becky Albertalli, quote from The Upside of Unrequited

“I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all.”

“Wow,” I said. “Did the search pay off?”

“That’s the hard part,” said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. “I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”

“Waiting for the perfect love?”

“No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.”

“I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,” I said with some amazement.

“It does,” she said. “You just don’t know it. There are time in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.”

“Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?”

“Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate Mousse? Cheesecake?”

“So then what?”

“So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.”

“Sounds crazy to me.”

“Well, to me, that’s what love is…”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Norvegų giria

“Love. It's the only thing to have faith in... Or the moon. Soemthing that turns up every day when you cant. The sun. The moon. Anything. You have to have faith in something.”
― Sarah Winman, quote from A Year of Marvellous Ways

“There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.”
― Reza Aslan, quote from No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.