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“She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet—since it was all for tenderness—she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man—that she loves you with passion.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“It has been everything for me to see you.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"

"Well, at peace with you."

"Oh, 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.

"The peace of having loved."

He raised his eyes to her. "Is that peace?"

"Of having been loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She had had all she wanted.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm doing.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“The vice in the air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“The days, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself was the taste of suspense.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“My dear man, what has happened to you?"

"Well, that I can bear it no longer. That's simply what has happened. Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's as I am that you must have me.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I love you. It's because I love you that I'm here.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were."

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“If you decline to understand me I wholly decline to understand you.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“What had come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious watchful presence, active on its own side, forever to be reckoned with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less futile than frivolous.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“The broken charm of the world about was broken into smaller pieces.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“She sat with him at any rate, in the grey clearance—as sad as a winter dawn—made by their meeting.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“There were immensities between you.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."

"You were neither of you thinking of any one else.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid, and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell her.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Don't you know?"

"How should I, my dear—in the absence of everything?”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's a person who does see.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“We've played our dreadful game, and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our feeling for ourselves and for each other, not to wait another day.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“We shall be so right . . . that we shall be strong; we shall only wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a bad dream.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“That's the least part of it—after it nothing will matter.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“He saw her try, for a time, to appear to consider it; but he saw her also not consider it.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“You look upset—you've certainly been tormented. You're not well.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“There was something deep within him that he had absolutely shown to no one—to the companion of these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of its publicity.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Your desire is to escape everything?"

"Everything.”
― Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

“Scenes are alluded to but not always witnessed—because in life, one sometimes arrives late, or not at all, to the big scene, even though one feels its aftershocks for years. Conversations are overheard, but not always completely understood, and sometimes, even the eavesdropping must be abruptly curtailed—as in life.”
― Amy Bloom