kate > kate's Quotes

“As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity.”
― Roberto Calasso, Οι γάμοι του Κάδμου και της Αρμονίας

“Secretly though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn't have a whole lot going on.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I wanted to escape, Ehud, my mouth constantly starved for your mouth, life was splendor and marvel, unparalleled glimmer when you touched me, and sinister and hiccuping and nothingness when you were abscent”
― Hilda Hilst, A Obscena Senhora D

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silence. And whenever you tell any one of the stories, whether you intend it or not, you include the shadow of all the others. The result is that once you have told one story, once you have undone the meshes of the net at one point, you are trapped. You are compelled to go on with the story. And because we ourselves, like all life, are stories, we become the story of the stories.”
― Herbert Rosendorfer, The Architect of Ruins

“You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Now, my novel begins. No, now I begin my novel—and yet I cannot decide whether to call myself I or she.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“Canadians, do not vomit on me!”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

“All of this follows from a time in history when procedures have taken command over rituals. A moment that is elusive, hard to establish, since the two powers also have features in common. First of all, they are both formalized actions. But they aim in opposite directions. Ritual aims toward perfect awareness, which for Catholics is the moment of transubstantiation. Procedures, on the other hand, point toward total automatism. The more procedures multiply, the more the realm of automata expands.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present

“The gods do not speak with everyone,” and so a way has to be devised to approach them: men must segregate themselves in the same way as the gods are segregated from men. Then perhaps the gods will pay attention. An initial separation from other men is achieved through the preliminary actions of the rite.

When setting up the gārhapatya fire, he first sweeps the chosen space with a palāśa branch and says: ‘Away from here! Away! Crawl away from here,’ then: ‘Go away, go and slip away from here,’ he says to those who slither on their bellies. ‘You who are here from ancient and recent times!’ and therefore both those who are here from a remote time as well as those who have settled here today.”

The ritual action is an imitation. Of other men, who lived in the beginning? Or of gods? During the building of the fire altar when certain bricks, known as dviyajus, “which require a double formula,” have to be arranged. At that moment the sacrificer thinks the following words: “I wish to go to the celestial world following the same form, celebrating the same rite that Indra and Agni used to enter the celestial world!” What the sacrificer is imitating is the act of the god himself making himself a god

Ritual serves above all to resolve through action what thought alone cannot resolve. For example: what do we do with the ash produced by the sacrificial fire? The ashes are thrown into water. And these words are spoken: “O divine waters, receive these ashes and place them in a soft and fragrant place!” And then: “May the consorts, married to a good lord, bow down to him.” The “consorts” here are the waters, who have found a “good lord” in Agni. The waters are chosen as a place for ashes, because Agni was born from the womb of the waters.So Agni will not be lost.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem”
― James Hillman, A Blue Fire

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”
― Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion

“Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
― Annie Ernaux, Happening