Lis > Lis's Quotes

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“sabe, Hillé, às vezes penso que fomos pai e filha, mãe e filho, irmão irmã, que houve lutas e nós, e fios de sangue, que eu tinha fome de ti, que eu te matei, que saía de tuas narinas um cheiro de noite dor incesto e violência, que eras velha e moça e menina, que uns guizos em mim se batiam estridentes cada vez que eu te olhava, que havias sido minha desde sempre, barro e vasilha, espelho e amplidão, infinitas vezes nós dois em flashes nítidos rapidíssimos, recortados em ouro, em negro, numa lua esvaída sombra e sépia, nós dois muito claros num parapeito de pedra cor de terra”
― Hilda Hilst, A Obscena Senhora D

“...e o que foi a vida? uma aventura obscena, de tão lúcida”
― Hilda Hilst, A Obscena Senhora D

“(...) tantos livros e nada no meu peito, tantas verdades e nenhuma em mim.”
― Hilda Hilst, A Obscena Senhora D

“Difícil dizer amor quando se ama,
E na memória aprisionar o instante.
Difícil tirar os olhos de uma chama
E de repente sabê-los na constante.”
― Hilda Hilst, Cantares

“Quem és? Perguntei ao desejo.
Respondeu: lava. Depois pó. Depois nada.”
― Hilda Hilst, Do Desejo

“Quero ser lida em profundidade e não como distração, porque não leio os outros para me distrair mas para compreender, para me comunicar. Não quero ser distraída.”
― Hilda Hilst, Fico besta quando me entendem: Entrevistas com Hilda Hilst

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album

“Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”
― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”
― sylvia plath

“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela