Frases de Henry James

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“As pessoas sempre me interessaram mas nunca me agradaram.”

“Era sempre possível a ele acusá-la de o ver como o mais inofensivo dos loucos, e isso, a longo prazo - já que tão abrangente -, era, a seu ver, a melhor definição daquela amizade; para ela, ele teria um parafuso frouxo, mas ela gostava dele assim mesmo e praticamente, contra o resto do mundo, era sua gentil e sábia guardiã, não remunerada mas bem contente, e na inexistência de outros laços, exercendo uma ocupação honrada. O resto do mundo com certeza o considerava esquisito, mas ela, ela somente, sabia como, e acima de tudo, por que esquisito; e isso era exatamente o que permitia a ela arrumar o véu do disfarce em dobras certas.”

“Ela, Kate Croy, esperava a vinda do pai, mas ele se fazia esperar, sem a menor consideração, e houve momentos em que a moça exibiu par si mesma, no espelho acima do console da lareira, um rosto decididamente pálido, com uma irritação que a levou a ponto de ir embora sem vê-lo.”

“Foi nesse ponto que ela viu completo o despedaçamento de sua grande pergunta, viu que lhe restava apenas o senso de estar ali com ele. E não houve arrepio, por isso, no que também acabou vendo -que, como quer que houvesse começado, agora agia por um desejo particular, determinado por novos fatos ou novas fantasias, de ser igual a todos os demais, simplificadoramente "bondoso" com ela.”

“É necessária uma grande quantidade de História para se fazer pouca literatura.”

“Não há mentira pior do que uma verdade mal compreendida por aqueles que a ouvem.”

“Para mim, um escritor tem justificação para escrever um livro se estiver apaixonado pelo tema.”

“A arte faz a vida, o interesse, a importância; não conheço nenhum substituto que tenha a força e a beleza deste processo.”

“Não prestes atenção ao que alguém te diga sobre outro. Acostuma-te a julgar cada um por ti mesmo.”

“Vive tanto quanto possas, é um erro proceder de outra maneira.”

“Não lamento um único excesso dos que cometi na juventude. Só lamento, na minha avançada idade, as ocasiões e possibilidades que não aproveitei.”

“As ideias são, na realidade, força.”

“É preciso muitíssima história para forjar uma pequena tradição.”

“A única obrigação que um romance deve cumprir desde o início, sem incorrer na acusação de arbitrariedade, é a de ser interessante.”

“O molho de pão honrado pelo tempo do final feliz.”

“Não pretendo saber para que servem as pessoas ", disse Madame Merle." Só sei o que posso fazer com elas.”

“Há poucas coisas mais emocionantes para mim, em resumo, do que uma razão psicológica.”

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”

“A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

“Her memory's your love. You want no other.”

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

“Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was. But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain, and I had more pains than one.”

“Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.”

“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.”

“The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.”

“The terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”

“She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To "do" – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.”

“Print it as it stands — beautifully.”

“The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.”

“The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take.”

“Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone.”

“The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.”

“Cats and monkeys — monkeys and cats — all human life is there!”

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"”

“However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like — not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.”

“It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.”

“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”

“To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.”

“There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.”

“Ideas are, in truth, force.”

“The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination… To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.”

“There's no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding.”

“So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

“Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband's house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.”

“In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.”

“No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong.”