The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

Creating isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality.

Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn’t I properly speaking, not what I’d usually call I. I was always in life.

But when one has been tortured to the point of becoming a nucleus, then one starts demonically wanting to serve the ritual, even if the ritual means consuming oneself — just as in order to have the incense the only way to get it is to burn the incense.

To me, as to everyone, everything had been given, but I wanted more: I wanted to know about that everything.

And then I looked at the door handle. After that I looked at the wood of the wardrobe. I looked at the glass of the window. Just look at what everything is: it’s a piece of thing, a piece of iron, of gravel, of glass.