The Passion According to G.H. Quotes

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.