Clarice Lispector - The Passion According to G.H. (1964)

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Putting my hand in someone else's has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don't have courage, I dream.

Clarice Lispector
I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Clarice Lispector
Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

Clarice Lispector
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
It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Clarice Lispector
In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Clarice Lispector
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 world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

Clarice Lispector
Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it.... The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

Clarice Lispector
Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage

Clarice Lispector