Jess > Jess's Quotes

“I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories

“Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.”
― Marcel Proust

“I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“To follow its shadow, to remain forever within it, she herself would have to become the sea. And at that moment, in a single great surge, she did.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“You're coming home again. what does that mean?
Can there be anyone here who still needs you, who would still want to count you as his friend?
You're home, you've bought sweet wine to drink with supper, and staring out the window bit by bit
You come to see that you're the one who's guilty:
the only one. that's fine. thank god for that.
or maybe one should say, "thanks for small favors"
It's fine that there is no one else to blame,
It's fine that you are free of all connections,
It's fine that in this world there is no one who feels obliged to love you to distraction.
It's fine that no one ever took your arm and saw you to the door on a dark evening,
It's fine to walk, alone, in this vast world
toward home from the tumultuous railroad station
It's fine to catch yourself, while rushing home,
mouthing a phrase that's something less than candid;
You're suddenly aware that your own soul is very slow to take in what has happened.”
― Joseph Brodsky, Selected Poems, 1968-1996

“Admit I find everything strange and foreign. She finds a metaphor for her condition without defining it.

It is my concern for happiness that cause me the most anguish.

She now used him to perform her own tragedy for herself.”
― Ann Quin, Passages

“She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling,”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.”
― Chris Marker

“How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours — with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it — and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret — so sharp! — that we haven’t lived through it together — whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissible — or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road — you see what I mean, my happiness?

And I know: I can’t tell you anything in words — and when I do on the phone then it comes out completely wrong. Because with you one needs to talk wonderfully, the way we talk with people long gone… in terms of purity and lightness and spiritual precision… You can be bruised by an ugly diminutive — because you are so absolutely resonant — like seawater, my lovely.

I swear — and the inkblot has nothing to do with it — I swear by all that’s dear to me, all I believe in — I swear that I have never loved before as I love you, — with such tenderness — to the point of tears — and with such a sense of radiance.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“- My mystery is simple: I don't know how to be alive. - Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?
[...]but, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Slow slow movements lifting over and under me. A distance from what has been preoccupying me. I walked along the cliff edge, feet holding the earth, the light around soft, sky so white. Then I knew I had experienced a kind of madness. Coming back to my body, a sense that I was perhaps someone else, some drifting thing that at least had found somewhere for inhabiting, not to remember happiness—just curiosity.

There has been a death recently no one has occupied the body since.

If going outside my body and I lose my ego what happens next? It no longer matters.”
― Ann Quin, Passages

“The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated
faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the
features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is
this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found
myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or
the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel;
our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth
naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these
pavements are shells, bones and silence.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“But she didn't fear the moon because she was more lunar than solar and could see with wide-open eyes in the dark dawns the sinister moon in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays, as there are others who sunbathed. And was becoming profoundly limpid.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“The last lights were undulating on the standing green water of the pool. Discovering the sublime in the trivial, the invisible underneath the tangible—she herself completely disarmed as if in that instant she'd learned that her ability to uncover the secrets of natural life was still intact. And also disarmed by the slight anguish that came to her when she felt she could uncover other secrets too, perhaps a mortal secret. But she knew she was ambitious: she'd scorn easy success and want, though she was afraid, to rise higher and higher or descend lower and lower.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“The intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when the ideal sea which he was becoming ever more intimately had in turn become the real sea, in which he was virtually drowned, he was not moved as he should have been: of course, there was something intolerable about swimming this way, aimlessly, with a body which was of no use to him beyond thinking that he was swimming, but he also experienced a sense of relief, as if he had finally discovered the key to the situation, and, as far as he was concerned, it all came down to continuing his endless journey, with an absence of organism in an absence of sea.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“I am not and I endure. An inexorable future stretches forth infinitely for this suppressed being. Hope turns in fear against time which drags it forward. All feelings gush out of themselves and come together, destroyed, abolished, in this feeling which molds me, makes me and unmakes me, causes me to feel, hideously, in a total absence of feeling, my reality in the shape of nothingness.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“By her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. and thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“We can live the way the others do and yet conceal a ‘no’ greater than the world: that is melancholy’s infinity…”
― Emil M. Cioran

“Nothing happened--or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle