san

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I'm stalling. I know that everything I say is just to put it off-to put off the moment when I'll have to start talking, knowing that there is nothing more for me to say. I'm putting off my silence. Have I been putting off silence for my whole life? but now, in my disparagement of the word, perhaps I'll finally be able to start talking." (14)”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

- Love Song”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“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.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.