novelists-from-brazil

"O cheiro de cravo, a cor de canela, eu vim de longe vim ver Gabriela."

"Os guerreiros de cá não buscam mavóorticas damas para o enlace epitalâmico; mas antes as preferem dóceis e facilmente trocáveis por pequeninas e voláteis folhas de papel a que o vulgo chamará dinheiro– o 'curriculum vitae' da Civilização."

"From the outside, the favela and everyone in it look the same, but there are various strata, and my family was one of those at the top of the pyramid…Below us were the garbage collectors, delivery boys and street vendors who made even less money than we did, and then those who were so poor that they never even left the favela and lived from odd jobs here and there."

"The world of the favela today is much more cruel than when I was growing up there or even as I show it in my book…If I were to write about the way things are today, I would start the book with a pile of rubber tires, gasoline and someone being burned alive."

"Brazil is a racist country and a racist society…But the funny thing is that nobody will admit to being a racist, and that's the problem. Blacks in Brazil are always in an inferior, subaltern position, but you can't find a white person who is a racist."

"These are two different worlds that have no contact with each other…The elite is ignorant of the favela because it doesn't want to see, and the favela doesn't know the rest of Brazil because it is deprived of the means and the opportunity."

"Every shy person is a potential sex offender."

"In soccer, the blindest player is the one who sees nothing but the ball."

"I envy stupidity, stupidity is eternal."

"A thunderous boo is one thousand times stronger, nobler, and more powerful than a standing ovation. Admiration corrupts."

"Any individual is greater than the Milky Way."

"Saturday is an illusion."

"All women like a beating."

"Money buys everything, even true love."

"I only believe in those who can still blush."

"Husbands shouldn't be the last to know. Husbands should never know!"

"Unanimity is always stupid."

"Man finds happiness only in the superfluous. Under communism, he has only the essentials. How abominable and ridiculous!"

"If life turns her back on you, grab her ass."

"I won't stand for censorship, not even from Jesus Christ."

"Not all women like a beating. Only the normal ones."

"Until the day when a wise black man can become our ambassador in Paris, we will forever be a pre-Brazil."""

"To save the audience we must fill the stage with murderers, adulterers and madmen; in short, we must fire a salvo of monsters at them. They are our monster which we will temporarily free ourselves from only to face another day."

"Sex education should only be taught by veterinarians."

"To love is to be faithful to those who cheat on us."

"The bed is a metaphysical piece of furniture."

"Memory is a swindler, a forger emeritus of facts and figures."

"The young have all the same flaws adults do. Plus one: immaturity."

"To be the best in the world in anything, even 'long distance spitting', implies a grave, heavy and suffocating responsibility."

"The audience will only truly respect you when they have no idea what is going on."

"I am, and have always been, a pornographic angel."

"The keyhole is my lens as a writer."

"Only the prophets see the obvious."

"Adulthood does not exist. Man is an eternal child."

"Love is impossible without bite marks."

"It's very hard not to be a scoundrel nowadays. Everywhere there are pressures that work towards our personal and collective debasement."

"Human beings are blind to their own faults. In the movies, villains never proclaim that they are villains. Nor do idiots say that they are idiots. Our faults lie within us, active and fierce, but unconfessed. I've never seen a man walk downstage and announce, his head held high, "Ladies and gentleman, I'm a scumbag!""

"Love is eternal. If it ends, it wasn't love."

"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."

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

"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..."

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

"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?"

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

"Was that, then, the way we do things? "Not knowing"— was that the way the most profound things happened? would something always, always have to be apparently dead for the really living to happen? had I had not to know that it was living? Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker? (p159)"

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

"Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. (p169)"

"...I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me. But while I was held down, was I happy? Or was there — and there was — an uncanny, restless something in my happy prison routine. Or was there - and there was - that trobbing something to which I was so accustomed that I thought throbbing was the same as being a person? Isn't that it? yes, that too...that too... (p5)"

"Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage (p16)"