Novelists From Brazil

"Humility in living isn’t my strong point. But when I write I’m fated to be humble. Though within limits. Because the day I lose my own importance inside me — all will be lost."

"Remembering that day, which she saw again, she thought that from now on this was all she wanted from the God: to rest her chest on him, and not say a word."

"it's only when we forget all our knowledge that we begin to know"

"Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea."

"There was beauty in that body that was neither ugly nor pretty, in that face in which a sweetness eager for greater sweetnesses was its sign of life. (from "A criada")"

"...when the celebration was fast approaching, what could explain the inner tumult that came over me? As if the budding world were finally opening into a big scarlet rose. (from "Restos do Carnaval")"

"It's with such intense joy. It's such an hallelujah. "Hallelujah," I shout, an hallelujah that fuses with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but is a shout of diabolical happiness. Because nobody holds me back anymore. I still have the ability to reason-I've studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason-but now I want plasma, I want to feed directly from the placenta. I'm a little frightened, still afraid to give myself over since the next instant is the unknown. Do I make the coming instant? Or does it make itself? We make it together with our breathing. And with the ease of a bullfighter in the ring. Let me tell you... I'm trying to capture the fourth dimension of the now-instant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer. Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing's is. Those instants that elapse in the air I breathe: in fireworks exploding silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. Only in the act of love — by the clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels — do we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crvstalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself: in love, the instant, an impersonal jewel, glitters in the air, a strange bodily glory, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds—and what one feels is at the same time immaterial and so objective that it happens as if it were outside the body, sparkling on high, happiness, happiness is the matter of time and the instant par excellence. And in the instant resides its own is. I want to capture my is. And I sing an hallelujah to the air, just as a bird does. And my song is no one’s. But there’s no passion suffered in pain and in love that’s not followed by an hallelujah."

"I write you completely whole and I feel a pleasure in being and my pleasure of you is abstract, like the instant. And it’s with my entire body that I paint my pictures and on the canvas fix the incorporeal — me, body-to-body with myself. One doesn’t understand music, one hears it. Hear me, then, with your whole body. When you come to read me you’ll ask why I don’t stick to painting and exhibiting my pictures, since my writing is coarse and orderless. It’s just that now I feel the need for words — and what I write is new to me because my true word has remained untouched until now. The word is my fourth dimension. (p4-5)"

"what beautiful music I hear deep within myself. It’s made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It’s chamber music. Chamber music is melody-less. It’s a way of expressing silence. What I’m writing you is chamber music. (p37)"

"I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again. (p55)"

"Sometimes she didn't think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn't have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast. (from "A partida do trem")"

"Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing..."

"Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting (p17)"

"even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury. (p61)"

"when I learned to read and write, I devoured books, and I thought that they were like trees, like animals, something that is born. I didn’t know there was an author behind it all. Eventually, I discovered that that’s how it was, and I said, “I want that, too.”"

"I was what I still am, a daring shy person. I’m shy, but I throw myself into things."

"what interests me is jotting things down. Putting it all together is a bore."

"(Between Ermelinda and Vitória, in “The Apple in the Dark,” which is more Clarice?) CL: Maybe Ermelinda, because she was fragile and scared. Vitória is a woman that I’m not. I’m Martim."

"When I’m not working, I read a review, and it’s all fine. When I’m working, a review of my work interferes with my intimate life, so I stop writing in order to forget the review. Even the positive ones, since I take care to cultivate humility. So sometimes I even feel attacked by praise."

"I am not a professional writer, because I write only when I want to."

"I don’t know how to explain it, but prizes are outside of literature—by the way, “literature” is a hateful word—yes, they’re outside the act of writing. You receive it the way you receive a hug from a friend, with a certain pleasure. But it has nothing to do with—(It’s circumstantial?) CL: Yes."

"(You, as a person, in the context of the world today, do you feel like part of society, or do you feel solitary?) CL: Well, I have friends, friendships, but writing is a solitary act. Outside the act of writing, I get along with people. (So you don’t feel solitude?) CL: Sometimes, sometimes, even quite deeply. Alceu Amoroso Lima wrote something that’s been repeated a lot, that I was in a tragic solitude in Brazilian letters."

"What’s natural is supernatural, too. Don’t think that it’s very far off. What’s natural is already a mystery."

"This is not a lament, it's the cry of a bird of prey. An iridescent and restless bird. The kiss upon the dead face. I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them."

"Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now. (p10)"

"I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error. (p10)"

"I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed (from "Another Couple of Drinks")"

"Today is Sunday and the city is lovely. There is no one on the streets and all the trees exist solitary and sovereign. The worries and desires and hatreds have dwindled, stretched out upon the earth, tired of existing. And at the level of my mouth all I find is the sweet, pure air of calm renunciation. (from "Cartas a Hermengardo")"

"There were many good feelings. Climbing the hill, stopping at the top and, without looking, feeling the ground covered behind her, the farm in the distance. The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun. And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory. (p36)"

"She feared the days, one after another, without surprises, of pure devotion to a man. To a man who would freely use of all of his wife’s forces for his own bonfire, in a serene, unconscious sacrifice of everything that wasn’t his own personality. (p80)"

"He walked looking at the buildings in the rain, impersonal and omniscient again, blind in the blind city; but an animal knows its forest; and even if it gets lost - getting lost is a path too. (11: The First Deserters)"

"It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of. (p139)"

"I have been sculpted into so many statues and haven't frozen in place ("Obsession")"

"The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo. Then, silence. The bright stain of sunlight lengthens little by little over the lawn. It goes climbing up the red wall of the house, making the ivy glisten in a thousand dewy lights. It finds an opening, the window. It penetrates. And suddenly takes possession of the room, slipping past the light curtains standing guard. Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude. The heat of the sun and its brightness fill the room. Luisa blinks. She frowns. Purses her lips. Opens her eyes, finally, and leaves them fixed on the ceiling. Little by little the day enters her body."

"He was sad and tall. He never spoke to me without making it understood that his gravest flaw lay in his tendency toward destruction. And that was why, he'd say, stroking his black hair as if stroking the soft, hot fur of a kitten, that was why his life amounted to a pile of shards: some shiny, others clouded, some cheerful, others like a "piece of a wasted hour," meaningless, some red and full, others white, but already shattered. (beginning of "História interrompida")"

"I just want to say that I write not for money but on impulse."

"It's not apparent to me that all these intimate movements of the book, as well as others that complement them-were drowned by what you call the "spell of the phrase." Ever since my first book, moreover, there's been talk about my "phrases." Do not doubt, however, that I wanted - and reached, by God - some thing through them, and not the phrases themselves."

"I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space."

"Really nothing happened on that gray afternoon in April. Everything, however, foretold a big day. (beginning of "Trecho")"

"Traduzo, sim, mas fico cheia de mêdo de ler traduções que fazem de livros meus. Além de ter basntante enjôo de reler coisas minhas, fico também com mêdo do que o tradutor possa ter feito com um texto meu..."

"The struggle to reach reality-that's the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision-the way of seeing, the viewpoint-alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man's way of looking constructs it too. The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge-this is so clear to me. Tradition, the past of a culture-what is that besides a way of seeing that is handed down to us?"

"It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story or a novel. Once they detach from me, I too find them unfamiliar. It's not a "trance," but the concentration during the writing seems to take away the awareness of whatever isn't writing itself."

"Twelve years weigh on a person like pounds of lead. The days melt into one another, merge to form one whole block, a big anchor. And the person is lost. ("A fuga")"

"One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrécia doesn't manage to do this--so she "clings" to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world."

"“I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up,” states the female narrator of Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva (The Stream of Life) as she pursues a narrative quest of self-discovery only to realize that her identity is compound and words cannot always convey what she actually feels. If the apple symbolizes knowledge and the chair an aspect of domesticity, this voice is affirming that she is greater than her gender. Despite an intense struggle with words, Lispector’s female protagonists nevertheless burst forth, sparked by unexpected epiphanies that lead them to probe their existential condition with a self-conscious awareness of the limitations of language and of their beleaguered situations. These narrator/protagonists also manifest experiences of displacement and otherness that, rather than inducing alienation, expand the knowledge of self, as exemplified by the words of another female narrator, GH: “He who lives totally is living for others.” Lispector’s prose also transmits the evocative and spiritual sense of the ineffable, an openness to a form of mystical and linguistic reception that transcends the concreteness of the written word to enable her characters and readers to experience a lyrical sense of the sublime, the “unsayable,” which scholar and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man Is Not Alone (1951), recognized as “the root of man’s creative activities in art, thought and noble living.”"

"Women's place is unfortunately the place society will allow us to have, for the time being. There are very fine women writers such as Clarice Lispector, who was an extraordinary writer and should have been part of the Boom. She belonged to the same generation as Cabrera Infante, so why was she not included in the Boom? Because she was a woman."

"Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce"

"Everything about Clarice Lispector was unlikely: her great beauty, her early fame, her unique voice, her status as an icon to Brazilians, her passions and masks, and her family history as the daughter of destitute Jews who barely escaped the murderous pogroms of their native Ukraine to settle in Recife. Perhaps as important to modern literature as Virginia Woolf."

"I have an affectionate fondness for the unfinished, the poorly made, whatever awkwardly attempts a little flight and falls clumsily to the ground."

"The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century."