Benjamin Moser > Quotes

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Everything touches me—I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“But one oughtn't be depressed by failing to live up to ideals. One ought to be depressed by not having tried.”
― Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

“You know you are in the presence of a great subject when it raises more questions than answers: and when you realize that the subject gets bigger the more you learn about it - that the more you learn, the more ignorant you start to feel.”
― Benjamin Moser, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

“The actor Kurt Krueger said: “I do not recall Leni to have been hateful towards anyone, even Hitler, except Susan Sontag.”
― Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work

“Escondida atrás dos dançantes ritmos africanos do samba, jaz uma melancolia que não é tão evidente como no tango argentino ou na rancheira mexicana. Para alguém que não entende as letras, esse pesar quase certamente passará despercebido - do contrário fica claro de imediato quão diferente a tristeza brasileira é da saudade que impregna o fado português. Portugal, Argentina e México nunca parecem felizes. O Brasil, sim. E o Brasil é um dos lugares mais tristes que há.
(...) Seus pais fundadores - os portugueses exilados, os africanos escravizados, os índios expropriados - tinham razão para estar tristes.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo

“Brasília é, na verdade, paisagem. "Se tirassem meu retrato em pé em Brasilia, quando revelassem a fotografia só sairia a paisagem", escreveu Clarice Lispector num famoso ensaio sobre a capital; e, de fato, a paisagem é tão opressora que encontrar-se preso em todo esse espaço é tão aterrorizante quanto ficar trancado numa sala pequena sem janelas.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo

“A ameaça, no Brasil, era sempre interna. (..) A polícia invadia as favelas; os favelados invadiam as praias; os agricultores sem terra invadiam fazendas' fazendeiros invadiam reservas ambientais; colonos invadiam reservas indígenas. A invasão incessante explicava por que os brasileiros morriam numa quantidade que, na maioria dos países, só seria atingida pelo rastro de uma terrível epidemia - ou por uma guerra feroz contra um adversário estrangeiro. O Brasil invadia-se a si mesmo.”
― Benjamin Moser, Autoimperialismo