The Passion According to G.H. Quotes

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy. Often before falling asleep - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and enter the greater world - often, before having the courage to go toward the greatness of sleep, I pretend that someone is holding my hand and I go, go toward the enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even then I can't find the courage, then I dream.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“—————— I’m searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand. Trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I lived. I don’t know what to do with what I lived, I’m afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else? That’s what I’d like to call disorganization, and I’d have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I’d rather call it disorganization because I don’t want to confirm myself in what I lived — in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don’t have the fortitude for another.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I don't want beauty, I want identity.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I am the cockroach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of brightest light on the wall plaster—I am every Hellish piece of myself—life is so pervasive in me that if they divide me in pieces like a lizard, the pieces will keep on shaking and writhing. I am the silence etched on a wall, and the most ancient butterfly flutters in and looks at me: just the same as always. From birth to death is what I call human in myself, and I shall never actually die. But this is not eternity, it is condemnation.

How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of the cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Perder-se é um achar-se perigoso.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I'm so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I, who called love my hope for love.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“...things are very delicate. People tread upon them with too many human feet, with too many sentiments. Only the delicacy of innocence or only the delicacy of the initiate senses its almost nonexistent taste. Before, I needed seasoning for everything, and in that way I skipped over the thing and tasted the taste of the seasoning.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Dá-me a tua mão desconhecida, que a vida está me doendo, e não sei como falar – a realidade é delicada demais, só a realidade é delicada, minha irrealidade e minha imaginação são mais pesadas.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regards to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Estou tão assustada que só poderei aceitar que me perdi se imaginar que alguém me está dando a mão.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I am going to create what happened to me. Only because living isn't tellable. Living isn't livable. I shall have to create upon life. And without lying. Yes to creation, no to lying. Creation isn't imagination, it's running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I shall need to courage to do what I'm about to do: speak. And risk the enormous surprise I shall feel at the poverty of the spoken thing. As soon as it's out of my mouth, I'll have to add: that's not it, that's not it! But I cannot be afraid of being ridiculous, I always preferred less to more also out of fear of the ridiculous: because there's also the shattering of modesty. I'm putting off having to speak to myself. Out of fear? And because I don't have a word to say. I don't have a word to say. So why don't I shut up? But if I do not force out the word muteness will swallow me forever in waves.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Eu tenho à medida que designo – e este é o esplendor de se ter uma linguagem . Mas eu tenho muito mais à medida que não consigo designar. A realidade é a matéria-prima, a linguagem é o modo como vou buscá-la – e como não acho. Mas é do buscar e não achar que nasce o que eu não conhecia, e que instantaneamente reconheço. A linguagem é o meu esforço humano.
Por destino tenho que ir buscar e por destino volto com as mãos vazias. Mas – volto com o indizível . O indizível só me poderá ser dado através do fracasso de minha linguagem. Só quando falha a construção, é que obtenho o que ela não conseguiu.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I'm blinder than before. I did see, I really did. I was terrified by the raw truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that for me to admit that I am as alive as it is - and my most hideous discovery is that I am as alive as it is - I shall have to raise my consciousness of life outside to so high a point that it would amount to a crime against my personal life.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.