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Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector Biography

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“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

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Author:Clarice Lispector
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“Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, 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.”

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Author:Clarice Lispector
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“It's always the same old pitfall: neither evil or the imagination. In the former, in the final center, the simple and adjectiveless feeling, blind as a rolling stone. In the imagination, for it alone has the power of evil, just the enlarged and transformed version: beneath it the impassive truth. You lie and stumble into the truth. Even in her freedom, when she chose cheerful new paths, she later recognized them. To be free was to carry on after all and there again was the beaten track. She would only see what was already inside her. Having lost the taste for imagining.”

TruthImaginationFreedom
Book:Near to the Wild Heart
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“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 recognize. 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 the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve. And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.”

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Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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“I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.”

SilenceSolitude
Book:Near to the Wild Heart
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“She’d thought: “Christ was Christ for others, but who? Who was a Christ for Christ?” He’d had to go directly to the God. And she, as she sat in the pew, had also wanted to be able to go directly to the Omnipotence, without having to go through Christ’s human condition which was also hers and everyone else’s. And, oh, God, not wanting to go to Him through the merciful condition of Christ might once again be nothing more than the fear of loving.”

LoveGodFear
Book:An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
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“From Ulisses she'd learned to have the courage to have faith--lots of courage, faith in what? In faith itself, since faith can be a real scare, it can mean falling into the abyss, Lori was afraid of falling into the abyssand was holding on to one of Ulisses's hands while Ulisses's other hand was pushing her into the abyss--soon she'd have to let go of the hand that was weaker than the one pushing her, and fall, life isn't a joke because in the middle of the day youd die. A human being's most pressing need was to become a human being.”

Human NatureClarice LispectorAn Apprenticeship
Author:Clarice Lispector
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“I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.”

HumanityExistentialism
Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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“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.”

LifeHellDestructionMadnessVengeanceRepression
Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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“But if I hope to understand in order to accept things - the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however that only by walking do you know how to walk and - miracle - find yourself walking.”

ThinkingUnderstandingActingAcceptanceCommitmentMiracleValueSurrenderMoving OnBehaviourBeingComprehensionPsychoanalysisFallingLearning By Doing
Author:Clarice Lispector
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“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”

Self
Book:Near to the Wild Heart
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“I’m about to begin halfway saying that— —that she was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. If she were an expressive creature she would say: the world is outside me, I am outside me.”

LonelinessIdentityMelancholyIntrospectionAlienationBleakPsychological FictionAbsurdismExistential AngstFeminist Literature
Book:The Hour of the Star
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“Beatitude begins at the moment thought-feeling has gone beyond the author’s need to think — he doesn’t need to think anymore and he now finds himself close to the grandeur of nothingness. One could also say of “everything”. But “everything” is quantity, and quantity has limits at its very outset. True incommensurability is nothingness, which has no barriers and is where a person can spread out her thought-feeling.”

Beauty
Book:Água Viva
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“When she was a little girl, her aunt, in order to frighten her, insisted that the vampire – the one that sucks human blood by biting its victims in the flesh of the neck – casts no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire, for the blood would add a touch of pink to her sallow complexion. For she gave the impression of having no blood unless a day might come when she would have to spill it.”

BeautyVampireChildhood Trauma
Book:The Hour of the Star
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“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.”

LanguageDestinyUnsayable
Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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“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.”

LifePhilosophySelf DiscoveryAbstract
Book:The Passion According to G.H.
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