Madeleine > Madeleine's Quotes

“I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.”
― Jacques Lacan

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
― Jacques Lacan

“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“To photograph people is to violate them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“When you see, the act of seeing has no form—what you see sometimes has form and sometimes doesn’t. The act of seeing is ineffable. And sometimes what is seen is also ineffable. And that’s how it is with a certain kind of thinking-feeling that I’ll call “freedom,” just to give it a name. Real freedom—as an act of perception—has no form. And as the true thought thinks to itself, this kind of thought reaches its objective in the very act of thinking. By that I don’t mean that it either vaguely or gratuitously is. It so happens that the primary thought—as an act of thought—already has a form and is more easily transmitted to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why—because it has a form—it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called “freedom” is free as an act of thought. It’s so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.”
― Annie Ernaux, Les Années