The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.”
“—————— 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.”
“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
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Book Keywords:
human, identity, existence, being, destruction, beauty, aesthetics, vengeance, desire, art, good, hell, fate, silence, aspiration, destiny, individuality, repression, life, evolution, predestination, will, love, truth, madness, language, free, yearning
