I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history... of human speech.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? You neve...r wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud, and what changes a darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things--what eternity is, for example--I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been cursed for delving into the mysteries of life. Perhaps death is sacred, and I've profaned it. Oh, what a wonderful visio...n it was. I dreamed of being the first to give to the world the secret that God is so jealous of, the formula for life. Think of the power, to create a man. And I did, I did it, I created a man. And who knows, in time I could have trained him to do my will. I could have bred a race, I might even have found the secret of eternal life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...expatriated Americans, even Henry James himself, have always seemed to me somewhat anchorless, rudderless, drifting before the ...wind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry Adams and Henry James invite obvious comparisons. Exact contemporaries on the American literary scene, both were beguiled by... European culture, both were distressed by American ills. Philosophically and aesthetically they also had much in common. But these two writers arrived at logically opposite extremes in struggling with the historical, political, economic, and social problems of their age. Adams came to view the basic impulse toward unity as the force that could give coherence to the multiplicity of experience; he viewed philosophies of history as aesthetic systems that made it possible to organize the incoherence of historical and natural events. James, on the other hand, felt that art and history were inextricably related, and that history could be viewed in terms of the differing interpretations man designs to relate himself to the social or natural world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favours his doing, when it is a question of r...ecollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that time, the shadow in which the detail of so many things can be discerned which the glare of day flattens out, the depth, the richness, the calm, the humour of the whole pageant--all this seems to have been his natural atmosphere and his most abiding mood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »