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

“Hickory dickory dock my daddy’s nuts from shell shock. Humpty dumpty thought he was wise till gas came along and burned out his eyes. A dillar a dollar a ten o clock scholar blow off his legs and then watch him holler. Rockaby baby in the tree top don’t stop a bomb or you’ll probably flop. Now I lay me down to sleep my bombproof cellars good and deep but if I’m killed before I wake remember god its for your sake amen.”
― Dalton Trumbo, quote from Johnny Got His Gun

“Celeste walked up, as strong as I’d ever seen her, and whispered something into Maxon’s ear.

When she was done, he smiled. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“Good.” She left, closing the door behind her, and I stood to take whatever was coming.

“What was that about?” I asked, nodding toward the door.

“Oh, Celeste was making it clear that if I hurt you, she’d make me cry,” he said with a smile.

I laughed. “I’ve been on the receiving end of those nails, so be careful there.”

“Yes, ma’am.”
― Kiera Cass, quote from The One

“Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in the cities, but the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.”
― Greg Mortenson, quote from Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“I believe in Free Will, the Force Almighty by which we conduct ourselves as if we were the sons and daughters of a just and wise God, even if there is no such Supreme Being. And by free will, we can choose to do good on this earth, no matter that we all die, and do not know where we go when we die, or if a justice or explanation awaits us.
I believe that we can, through our reason, know what good is, and in the communion of men and women, in which the forgiveness of wrongs will always be more significant than the avenging of them, and that in the beautiful natural world that surrounds us, we represent the best and the finest of beings, for we alone can see that natural beauty, appreciate it, learn from it, weep for it, and seek to conserve it and protect it.
I believe finally that we are the only true moral force in the physical world, the makers of, ethics and moral ideas, and that we must be as good as the gods we created in the past to guide us.
I believe that through our finest efforts, we will succeed finally in creating heaven on earth, and we do it every time that we love, every time that we embrace, every time that we commit to create rather than destroy, every time that we place life over death, and the natural over what is unnatural, insofar as we are able to define it.
And I suppose I do believe in the final analysis that a peace of mind can be obtained in the face of the worst horrors and the worst losses. It can be obtained by faith in change and in will and in accident and by faith in ourselves, that we will do the right thing, more often than not, in the face of adversity.
For ours is the power and the glory, because we are capable of visions and ideas which are ultimately stronger and more enduring than we are.
That is my credo. That is my belief, for what it's worth, and it sustains me. And if I were to die right now, I wouldn't be afraid. Because I can't believe that horror or chaos awaits us.
If any revelation awaits us at all, it must be as good as our ideals and our philosophy. For surely nature must embrace the visible and the invisible, and it couldn't fall short of us. The thing that makes the flowers open and the snowflakes fall must contain a wisdom and a final secret as intricate and beautiful as the blooming camellia or the clouds gathering above, so white and so pure in the blackness.
If that isn't so, then we are in the grip of a staggering irony. And all the spooks of hell might as well dance. There could be a devil. People who burn other people to death are fine. There could be anything.
But the world is simply to beautiful for that.
At least it seems that way to me.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Witching Hour

“Cracking his knuckles, Cary dramatically prepared to open his fortune cookie. “Let’s see. Will I be rich? Famous? About to
meet Mr. or Ms. Tall, Dark, and Tasty? Traveling to distant lands? What’d you guys get?”
“Mine’s lame,” I said. “In the end all things will be known. Duh. I didn’t need a fortune to figure that out.”
Gideon opened his and read, “Prosperity will knock on your door soon.”
I snorted.
Cary shot me a look. “I know, right? You snatched someone else’s cookie, Cross.”
“He better not be anywhere near someone else’s cookie,” I said dryly.
Reaching over, Gideon plucked half of mine out of my fingers. “Don’t worry, angel. Your cookie is the only one I want.”
He popped it in his mouth with a wink.
“Gag,” Cary muttered. “Get a room.” He cracked his fortune with a flourish, and then scowled. “What the fuck?”
I leaned forward. “What’s it say?”
“Confucius say,” Gideon ad-libbed, “man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day.”
Cary threw half his cookie at Gideon, who caught it deftly and grinned.
“Give me that.” I snatched the fortune out from between Cary’s fingers and read it. Then laughed.
“Fuck you, Eva.”
“Well?” Gideon prodded.
“Pick another cookie.”
Gideon smiled. “Pwned by a fortune.”
Cary threw the other half of his cookie.”
― Sylvia Day, quote from Bared to You

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.