Scott Sperling

“Like the majority of irreproachably virtuous women, wearying often of the monotony of a virtuous life, Dolly from a distance excused illicit love, and even envied it a little.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Our men have been real Frenchmen, and their wives--I may say it--have been worthy of them. You may see all their portraits at our house in Auvergne; every one of them an "injured" beauty, but not one of them hanging her head. Not one of them had the bad taste to be jealous... These are great traditions, and it doesn't seem to me fair that a little American bourgeoise should come in and pretend to alter them, and should hang her photograph, with her obstinate little "air penche”
― Henry James, Madame de Mauves

“He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves?”
― Henry James, Madame de Mauves

“A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression”
― Henry James, The art of fiction