Habits Quote by Henry James

“He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at…

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving…

— Jonathan Franzen

“Through some happy accident of heredity he had escaped his father's tediousness, while retaining a little of his mother's jolly high spirits and humor.…

— William Styron

“For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an…

— Robert Musil

“There was an ill-fated aspect to all of his love’s labours, however, for they required of their object a delicacy of intuition that he…

— Eleanor Catton

“to arrive at this flourishing condition had required years. He had undergone everything, in the shape of privation; he had done everything, except get…

— Victor Hugo

“His nature was not a suspicious one, and he did not take pleasure, as some men did, in believing himself to have been betrayed.”

— Eleanor Catton

“It was as simple as that. Once he had yearned for choice. then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong…

— Lois Lowry

“And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions,…

— Thomas Hardy

“I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had…

— Laurence Sterne

“He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that…

— Thomas Mann

“His years of dependency were past. It was time to grow up and take charge. It was not going to be easy. But he…

— Mary Balogh