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Henry James cytaty
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Henry James – amerykańsko-brytyjski pisarz, krytyk i teoretyk literatury.

Henry James urodził się jako drugie z pięciorga dzieci Henry'ego Jamesa seniora i Mary Robertson Walsh. Dzięki fortunie dziadka rodzina nie znała problemów finansowych. Brat Henry'ego Jamesa, William James, został profesorem Uniwersytetu Harvarda i jednym z prekursorów pragmatyzmu. Istniała między nimi pewna rywalizacja, mimo że więzi, które ich łączyły, były bardzo silne.

Po 5-letnim pobycie w Europie rodzina przeniosła się do Nowej Anglii, gdzie pozostała do końca wojny domowej. We wrześniu 1862 Henry zapisał się na wydział prawa Uniwersytetu Harvarda, który później porzucił, poświęcając się twórczości literackiej. Pierwszą swą nowelę opublikował w 1864 anonimowo. The Story of the Year, jego pierwsze podpisane opowiadanie, ukazało się w marcu 1865 w "Atlantic Monthly".

Od lutego 1869 do wiosny 1870 James podróżował po Europie, udając się najpierw do Anglii, później do Francji, Szwajcarii i Włoch. Po powrocie do Cambridge opublikował Watch And Ward .

W 1915, zawiedziony postawą USA wobec Wielkiej Wojny, przyjął obywatelstwo brytyjskie. Umarł kilka tygodni później, 28 lutego 1916 roku, po dwóch atakach serca.

✵ 15. Kwiecień 1843 – 28. Luty 1916
Henry James Fotografia
Henry James: 159 cytatów0 Polubień

Henry James słynne cytaty

„Smutek jest niejako chorobą, poddaniem się, przeciwieństwem akcji. Działanie – jakiekolwiek działanie – stanowi więc ucieczkę, może nawet do pewnego stopnia lekarstwo.”

Henry James książka Portret damy

Portret damy

„Czymże jest postać, jeśli nie czynnikiem determinującym zdarzenie? I czymże jest zdarzenie, jeśli nie ilustracją postaci?”

Henry James

Źródło: Sztuka fikcji

„Można zadać sto pytań tym grubo ciosanym olbrzymom, kiedy pochylają się i przypatrują swoim upadłym towarzyszom.”

Henry James

o Stonehenge.
Źródło: Rosemary Burton, Richard Cavendish, Cuda Świata. Przewodnik po skarbach cywilizacji

„Zakochana dziewczyna nie ma wolnego wyboru, ale źródło błędu jest w niej samej.”

Henry James książka Portret damy

Portret damy

„Skok cywilizacji w tę otchłań krwi i ciemności (…) to pożegnanie całego długiego wieku, podczas którego sądziliśmy, że świat (…) będzie się stopniowo polepszać.”

Henry James

w liście do przyjaciela z 1914, nazajutrz po wypowiedzeniu wojny Niemcom przez Wielką Brytanię.
Źródło: Howard Zinn, Ludowa historia Stanów Zjednoczonych. Od roku 1492 do dziś, tłum. Andrzej Wojtasik, Wyd. Krytyki Politycznej, Warszawa 2016, s. 465.

Henry James: Cytaty po angielsku

“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 książka Portret damy

Źródło: 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 książka The Turn of the Screw

Źródło: 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 książka The Turn of the Screw

Źródło: 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 książka Portret damy

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 książka Hawthorne

Hawthorne, ch. IV: Brook Farm and Concord.

“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 książka The Turn of the Screw

Źródło: 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 książka The Turn of the Screw

Źródło: 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 książka Portret damy

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

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

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Henry James książka 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 książka Portret damy

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 książka Portret damy

Źródło: 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 książka Portret damy

Źródło: 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 książka Portret damy

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 książka 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 książka Portret damy

Źródło: 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 książka The Ambassadors

The Ambassadors, book VII, ch. I.

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

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Henry James książka The Altar of the Dead

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

“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.”

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Henry James książka The Turn of the Screw

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.
Źródło: 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 książka 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 książka 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 książka The Awkward Age

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

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