She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table.

About Henry James

Portrait of Henry James

Henry James ((1843-04-15)15 April 1843 – (1916-02-28)28 February 1916) was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of theologian Henry James...

More quotations from Henry James

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

writing novels interest

Summer afternoon-summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Summer afternoon—Summer afternoon… the two most beautiful words in the English language.

She had an unequalled gift… of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

More quotations tagged with “grace”

Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It's a way to live.

—Jackie Windspear

life gratitude prayer grace

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

—Thomas Cahill

war history pain grace catastrophe outrage

If you open yourself to grace working through you, then grace works on you and in you as well. Grace is what has kept me going.

—John Records

So you think that you’re a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What’s wrong with that? In the first place, if you’ve any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.

freedom style failure grace triumph defeat

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

—Steven Weinberg

humanity life universe tragedy grace

History

18 Mar 2015 Added