Frasi di Henry James (187 frasi, pagina 5)

Origine: Da L'arte della narrativa; citato in Lilla Maione, introduzione a Robert Louis Stevenson, L'isola del tesoro, traduzione di Lilla Maione, Universale Economica Feltrinelli, X ed., Milano, 2014, p. 31.

Frasi sulla bellezza di Henry James

“Non è una bellezza, ma è bella, due cose molto diverse. Una bellezza ha un viso impeccabile, mentre il viso di una bella donna può avere difetti che servono soltanto a intensificare il suo fascino.”

Henry James

1993, p. 43

“In arte l'economia è sempre bellezza.”

Henry James

Origine: Da Le prefazioni.

“Newman guardò per qualche istante la signora Tristram, lisciandosi i baffi.
«È una vera bellezza?» domandò.
«No»
«Oh, allora è inutile…»
«Non è una bellezza, ma una donna bellissima: due cose assai diverse. Una bellezza non ha difetti sul volto; il volto di una donna bellissima può avere dei difetti che non fanno che rendere più profondo il suo fascino».”

Henry James

1988, p. 49

“Monsieur sa bene com'è Parigi. Una città pericolosa per la bellezza, quando la bellezza non possiede un sou.”

Henry James

1993, p. 47

Henry James Frasi e Citazioni

“Napoli – una città dove il «piacere» è attivamente coltivato.”

Henry James

p. 268

“Il gentiluomo sul divano era un formidabile esemplare americano. Ma non si limitava ad essere un bell'americano; era in primo luogo, fisicamente, un bell'uomo.”

Henry James

1993, p. 19

“La gente è superba soltanto quando ha qualcosa da perdere, e umile quando ha qualcosa da guadagnare.”

Henry James

1993, p. 80

“Odo ancora, mentre scrivo, l'intenso silenzio in cui si cessarono tutti i suoni della sera. Le cornacchie smisero di gracchiare nel cielo dorato e l’ora amica smarrì, per quell'orribile momento, tutta la sua voce. Ma non ci fu nessun altro cambiamento intorno a me, se cambiamento non era vedere con tanto singolare chiarezza. L’oro luccicava ancora nel cielo, l’aria era limpida e l’uomo che mi osservava da sopra i merli risaltava quanto un ritratto nella sua cornice. Ecco perché pensai, con straordinaria rapidità, a tutti coloro che egli avrebbe potuto essere e che non era. Ci fissammo attraverso lo spazio abbastanza a lungo perché potessi chiedermi ansiosamente chi fosse mai, e provare, dinanzi all'incapacità di rispondervi, uno sbigottimento che, a poco a poco, si faceva sempre più intenso.”

Henry James libro Il giro di vite

The Turn of the Screw

“Forse farò un favore al lettore dicendogli come dovrà trascorrere una settimana a Perugia. La sua prima cura sarà di non aver fretta, di camminare dappertutto molto lentamente e senza meta e di osservare tutto quello che i suoi occhi incontreranno.”

Henry James

Origine: Da Transatlantic Sketches, 1875; citato in Perugia, Guide Electa Umbria, 1993.

“L'uomo sano e saggio non si allontana mai dalla ragione e non si concede nessuno svago se non quello del proprio lavoro.”

Henry James

Origine: Da La lezione dei maestri.

“[Su Isabella Stewart Gardner, a proposito di] quelle sere alla sua mensa e nel suo palco, quei tè nelle sue belle sale coperte di quadri, che mi splendono agli occhi della memoria come vere stazioni di salvezza.”

Henry James

Origine: Citato in Aline B. Saarinen, I grandi collezionisti americani, Einaudi Editore, 1977 da La Lettura, Rizzoli Editore, dicembre 1977.

“È sciocco dubitar di sé stessi come sarebbe dubitare del proprio miglior amico: anzi si deve cercare di essere il proprio migliore amico e di vivere così in eletta compagnia.”

Henry James

p. 48

“[…] essendo infatti uno degli svantaggi dell'esprimere avversione, che voi non potete godere nello stesso tempo il credito dell'esprimer simpatia.”

Henry James

p. 484

“Stare a Roma e non far mai una passeggiata a piedi, sarebbe, mi sembra, poco divertente.”

Henry James

p. 251

“Ogni persona porta nella sua religione le caratteristiche della sua natura.”

Henry James

p. 254

“Uno scultore non è un sarto.”

Henry James

p. 275

“Se non fossi venuto a Roma, non mi sarei mai innalzato, e se non mi fossi innalzato, non sarei caduto.”

Henry James

p. 384

“Come dice il proverbio francese, la più bella donna del mondo può dare soltanto ciò che possiede.”

Henry James

1993, p. 40

“Io trovo che si riesce a derivare molto più piacere da questa malinconica esistenza se non si guarda troppo per il sottile.”

Henry James

1993, p. 73

“[…] la passione amorosa separa terribilmente le sue vittime da tutti, tranne che dall'oggetto amoroso”

Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

The Portrait of a Lady

“E non puoi sempre piacere a te stessa, qualche volta devi piacere agli altri! […] ma c'è una cosa che è anche più importante: devi spesso dispiacere agli altri.”

Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

The Portrait of a Lady

Questa traduzione è in attesa di revisione. È corretto?

“La consueta salsa di pane del lieto fine.”

Henry James

Questa traduzione è in attesa di revisione. È corretto?

“Inoltre, provo a giudicare le cose da solo; giudicare male, penso, è più onorevole che non giudicare affatto.”

Henry James

Questa traduzione è in attesa di revisione. È corretto?

“Ci sono poche cose più eccitanti per me, insomma, di una ragione psicologica.”

Henry James

Henry James: Frasi in inglese

“The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

Origine: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XLII.

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

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Henry James

Letter to Henry James Sr. (26 October 1869).

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

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Henry James

"Venice," The Century Magazine, vol. XXV (November 1882), reprinted in Portraits of Places (1883) and later in Italian Hours http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8ihou10.txt (1909), ch: I: Venice, pt. I.

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

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Henry James

"Robert Louis Stevenson," Century Magazine (April 1888).

“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.”

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Henry James libro Il giro di vite

Origine: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXII.

“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.”

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Henry James libro Il giro di vite

Origine: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XIII.

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

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Henry James

Criticism (1893).

“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.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

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

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Henry James

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

“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.”

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Henry James Roderick Hudson

Roderick Hudson.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“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.”

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Henry James libro Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. IV: Brook Farm and Concord.

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

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Henry James

Notebook entry, Boston, (25 November 1881).

“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.”

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Henry James

Letter to Hugh Walpole (21 August 1913).

“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.”

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Henry James

Criticism.

“…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!”

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Henry James libro Il giro di vite

Origine: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. I.

“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.”

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Henry James libro Il giro di vite

Origine: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXIV.

“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.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

Origine: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XXIX

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

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Henry James libro Theatricals

Theatricals: Second Series (1895).

“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.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

“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.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

Origine: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XVI.

“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.”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

Origine: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. LI

“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: […].”

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

XLIV
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

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

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Henry James libro The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse (1890), ch. IX.

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

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Henry James libro Ritratto di signora

Origine: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. XXII.

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

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Henry James libro The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors, book VII, ch. I.

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

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Henry James libro The Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

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Henry James libro Il giro di vite

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.
Origine: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXIV.

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

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Henry James libro The Ambassadors

They're the most wonderful sort.
Book V, ch. III.
The Ambassadors (1903)

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

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Henry James libro The Awkward Age

Said by the Duchess in Book V, ch. XIX.
The Awkward Age (1899)

“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.”

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Henry James libro The Awkward Age

Said by Vanderbank in Book I, ch. II.
The Awkward Age (1899)