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.”

“Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.”

“I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.”

“A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.”

“Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, nonetheless, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one's self, all the nature.”

“The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance — all strewn with crumpled playbills.”

“The practice of "reviewing"… in general has nothing in common with the art of criticism.”

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.”

“Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial — he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.”

“My choice is the old world — my choice, my need, my life.”

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about — and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth — I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”

“The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions… In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torchbearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother… Just in proportion as he is sentient and restless, just in proportion as he reacts and reciprocates and penetrates, is the critic a valuable instrument.”

“…I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy tales. Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilised, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!”

“It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might. It was like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm's length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead.”

“The working of this young lady's spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.”

“The time-honored bread-sauce of the happy ending.”

“To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of.”

“If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. […] You know that what you ask is impossible […] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly.”

“What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.”

“Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: […].”

“The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.”

“I don't pretend to know what people are meant for," said Madame Merle. "I only know what I can do with them.”

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

“The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!"”

“It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy himself unaware. The inspiration—I can call it by no other name—was that I felt how voluntarily, how transcendently, I might.”

“[T]here are women who are for all your "times of life."”

“Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box.”

“I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.”