"I was afraid of God's face, I was afraid of my final nakedness on the wall. The beauty, that new absence of beauty that had nothing to do with what I had been calling beauty, terrified me."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"There exists a sensing between sensing- in the interstices of primordial matter there is a mysterious, fiery line that is the world's breathing, and the world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"Identity is forbidden me, I know. But I am going to put myself at peril by having faith in my future cowardice, and it will be my essential cowardice that will reorganize me again into a person."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"My error, however, had to be the path of truth: for only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I understand...it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside in precisely what I shall never understand."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"We are creatures who need to dive to the depths in order there to breath."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"The most unreachable part of my soul, the one not belonging to me, is the part that touches on my border with what is not me and the part to which i give myself over. My whole anxiety has been this untranscendable and excessively close proximity. I more what is not within me."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"Living life instead of living one's own life is forbidden. It is a sin to go into divine matter. And that sin had an inexorable punishment: the person who dares go into that secret, in losing her individual life, disorganizes the human world."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"Listen, it is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of. Identity can be dangerous because of the intense pleasure that may become mere pleasure and nothing more...I was accustomed only to transcending. Hope, for me, had been deferral. I had never left my soul free, and I had quickly organized myself into a person because it is too risky to lose form. But now I see what was really happening to me. I had so little faith in what exits that had deferred nowness for a promise and for a future."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"We suffer because we have so little hunger, although our small hunger is still enough for us to feel the profound loss of the pleasure we would have had if we had a greater hunger...However much more we need, the more God exists."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"That furious, murderous avidity of ours is in fact our sacred, vital fury, our attempt to violate ourselves, the effort to eat more than we can so as to increase our hunger artificially- in the demand for life everything is legitimate, even the artificial, and the artificial is often the great sacrifice that is made to get to the essential."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"There exists a thing that is broader, deafer, and deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Even though that tooruns the risk of being transformed into "purity" in our gross hands, our hands that are gross and full of words."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"I only topped in my fury when I realized with surprise that I was undoing everything I had laboriously done, when I realized that I was betraying myself. And that, poor me, I couldn't get beyond my own life."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"Solitude is simply having human destiny...Don't be afraid of that lacking: it is our greater destiny."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor that is performed under merely apparent labor, life is a secret mission. 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. And the secret is such that only if the mission is finally carried out do I, all of a sudden, see that I was born entrusted with it- all of life is a secret mission. The deheroization of myself is undermining the ground beneath my edifice, doing so despite me like an unknown calling. Until it is finally revealed to me that life in me does not bear my name. And I also have a name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize to the point of not having a name, I shall answer every time someone says: me. Deheroization is the grand failure of a life."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"It is precisely through the foundering of the voice that one hears for the first time one's own silence and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.