ineffaceability

Updated: May 23, 2025

The ineffaceability was the anguish, to my tender sense, of Nicholas's starved and tattered and fawning and whining protégé; in face of my sharp retention of which through all the years who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre, or that the stage is the mightiest of modern engines?

Henry James - A Small Boy and Others

But what remains of it all now is a mere tone in the air, a faint sigh in the breeze, a vague expression in things, a passive or call it rather, perhaps, to be fair, a shyly, pathetically responsive accessibility to the yearning guess. Call it much or call it little, the ineffaceability of this deep stain of experience, it is the interest of old places and the bribe to the brooding analyst.

Henry James - Italian Hours