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

“There's no requirement that jobs be meaningful. If there was, half the country would be unemployed.”
― Max Barry, quote from Company

“Suffering is normal. Pain is normal, it is part of life... What is its texture, the weight of our suffering? What is its meaning? Begin by touching it, by coming close to it, accepting it: Hello, suffering, I am here with you. I am beside you, one with you, I am you. I am suffering.”
― A.M. Homes, quote from This Book Will Save Your Life

“I am the Little Bug Spirit. I come to people when they begin to take themselves too seriously. They think they are big. I cut them down to size." This angered me. I tried to speak, but I couldn't get my thoughts together. The person went on, “I am the stone under your foot. I am the bug that bites you in the ass. I am the fart that comes when you are introduced to the important visiting professor. I am menstrual cramps and diarrhea." I kept getting angrier. “My tools are lies and tricks, misunderstandings and accidents. Everything stupid and undignified happens because of me. Hola! I am something!”
― quote from A Woman of the Iron People

“Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, quote from Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life

“A warbler singing— somewhere beyond the willow, before the thicket”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings

Interesting books

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.