Clarice Lispector

Lispector’s most shocking novel. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door —crushing the cockroach —and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature… Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

The Passion According to G.H.

Brianna Hawkins

smile??

But I'm so little prepared to understand. Before, whenever I tried, my limitations gave me a physical sensation of discomfort, any beginning of thought immediately banged into my forehead. Early on I had to recognize, without complaint, the limits of my small intelligence, and I strayed from the path. I knew I was destined to think little, reasoning kept me confined inside my own skin. So how was I supposed to inaugurate thinking within me now? and maybe only thought can save me. I'm afraid of passion.

shivani karadia

Each moment of finding is a getting lost.

When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

Noreen Farsai

Annie Millman

All sudden understanding closely resembles an acute incomprehension.

No. All sudden understanding is finally the revelation of an acute incomprehension. Each moment of finding is a getting lost.

But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop. If I screamed nobody could ever help me again; whereas, if I never revealed my neediness, I wouldn’t scare anybody by venturing outside the rules. But if they find out, they’ll be scared, we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret. If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.

ㅤrizki

How I hate the light of the sun that reveals everything, reveals even the possible.

I'm searching, I'm searching. I'm trying to understand. Trying to give what I've lived to someone 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.

sofia 🪆

“And that that way I would draw near to whatever is… divine? to whatever is real? The divine for me is whatever is real.”

The Passion According to G.H. quotes

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