Hilst Quotes & Sayings

With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don't know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don't know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There's a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I'm dying and I will never be heard. Now I'm a spirit. I'm free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog. — Hilda Hilst

He was staring down another loss, and, though he had to be logical, though he knew her to be logical, he saw the stricken look of betrayal on her face, and all of those arguments threatened to fly away from him. What was history anyway but the lies of the winning few? Why was it worth protecting, when it forgot the starving child under siege, the slave woman on her deathbed, the man lost at sea? It was an imperfect record written by a biased hand, diluted to garner the most agreement from competing parties. He was tempted to see her point, to imagine that she could realign the past and present and future into something beautiful. God, if anyone was capable of it, it would be her. — Alexandra Bracken

Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief. — Benjamin Moser

God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God. — Hilda Hilst

I am a feminist because I dislike everything that feminism implies. I desire an end to the whole business, the demands for equality, the suggestion of sex warfare, the very name feminist. I want to be about the work in which my real interests like, the writing of novels and so forth. But while inequality exists, while injustice is done and opportunity denied to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist. And I shan't be happy till I get ... a society in which there is no distinction of persons either male or female, but a supreme regard for the importance of the human being. And when that dream is a reality, I will say farewell to feminism, as to any disbanded but victorious army, with honour for its heroes, gratitude for its sacrifice, and profound relief that the hour for its necessity has passed. — Winifred Holtby

Men practice war; beasts do not. — Seneca The Younger

I wanted to escape, Ehud, my mouth constantly starved for your mouth, life was splendor and marvel, unparalleled glimmer when you touched me, and sinister and hiccuping and nothingness when you were abscent — Hilda Hilst

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol. — G.K. Chesterton

Third tale (aka short stories) - His name is Sun and Adultery. My husband's is Elias. My children are named Enilson and Joaquim. I want them all to die. Except him. (That first one, light and bed.) I'm very sorry, my God, but there it is. Signed: Lazinha. — Hilda Hilst

If you didn't have anything truly great to offer, something truly amazing, then you should just shut the fuck up. — Janet Fitch

I am the bringer of beef and the singer of sweet suppertime! Mine is the chicken and the gravy forever, nom nom! — Kevin Hearne

I have reservations about everything I do. — Larry David

How does individual randomness turn into collective regularity? Easy - the odds demand it. The — Anonymous