Short Story Writers From Brazil

"there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent. Why unspeaking? (p60)"

"Freedom isn't enough. What I desire doesn't have a name yet. (p61)"

"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)"

"...jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul. (p135)"

"The words are pebbles rolling in the river. (p179)"

"She'd be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She'd never know how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic-it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one. The two of them were leaning over the fragile bridge and Virgínia was feeling her bare feet falter insecurely as if they were dangling atop the calm whirl of the waters. It was a violent and dry day, in broad fixed colors; the trees were creaking beneath the warm wind wrinkled by swift cool drafts. The thin and torn girlish dress was pierced by shivers of coolness. With her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge, Virginia was plunging her distracted eyes into the waters. Suddenly she'd frozen tense and light: "Look!""

"Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond."

"Courage however was deciding to start. As long as she didn't begin, the city was intact. And it would be enough to start looking to smash it into a thousand pieces that she could never put back together afterward. It was a patience of constructing and demolishing and constructing again and knowing she might die one day right when she'd demolished in the process of building."

"Even error was a discovery. Erring would make her find the other face of objects and touch their dusty sides. (6: Sketch of the City)"

"There wasn't so much as a gesture that could express the new reality. (9: The Exposed Treasure)"

"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)"

"Early in the morning it was always the same thing renewed: waking up. Which was languorous, unfurling vast. Vastly she'd open her eyes. (beginining of "Preciosidade")"

"It was one of those mornings that seem to hang in the air. And that are most akin to the idea we have of time. (beginining of "Começos de uma Fortuna")"

"This tale begins in March on a night as dark as night can get when a person is asleep. The peaceful way in which time was passing could be seen in the high passage of the moon across the sky. Then later on, much deeper into night, the moon too disappeared. There was nothing now to distinguish Martim's sleep from the slow and moonless garden. When a man slept so deeply, he came to be the same as that tree standing over there or the hop of a toad in the darkness."

"Sitting there in his plot he was enjoying his own vast emptiness. That way of not understanding was the primeval mystery and he was an inextricable part of it. (chapter 6)"

"As for Martim, he had time. In fact, he seemed to have discovered time. (Chapter 10)"

"That was how that man was growing, the way a rolling thing takes on volume. He was growing calmly, emptily, indirectly, patiently advancing. (chapter 10)"

"In the last analysis a man is measured by his hunger; there is no other way of figuring things out. (chapter 1)"

"Repetition seemed essential to him. Every time it was repeated, something seemed to have been added. So much so that Martim was already starting to get upset-he was a man, but something worrisome remained: what does a man do? (chapter 1)"

"To the point at which, that afternoon up on the hill, Martim began to judge himself. The unpleasant time for explanations had arrived. (Chapter 2)"

"Growth is full of tricks and self-derision and fraud; only a few people have the requisite dishonesty not to become nauseated. With the fierceness of self-preservation Martim could no longer permit himself the luxury of decency or interrupt himself with sincerity. (chapter 3)"

"To Potential Readers: This is a book just like any other book. But I would be happy if it were read only by people whose outlook is fully formed. People who know that an approach-to anything whatsoever-must be carried out gradually and laboriously, that it must traverse even the very opposite of what is being approached. They and they alone will, slowly, come to understand that this book exacts nothing of anyone. Over time, the character G. H. came to give me, for example, a very difficult pleasure; but it is called pleasure."

"I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don't know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience. I don't know what to do with it, I'm terrified of that profound disorganization. I'm not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn't know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It's that something that I'd like to call disorganization, and then I'd have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don't want to ground myself in what I experienced-in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don't have the capacity for another one. (beginning)"

"...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)"

"The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. (p90)"

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

"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)"

"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)"

"By not being, I was. To the edge of what I wasn’t, I was. What I am not, I am. Everything will be within me, if I am not; for “I ” is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms. My life doesn’t have a merely human sense, it is much greater — it is so much greater that, in relation to human sense, it is senseless. Of the general organization that was greater than I , I had till now perceived only the fragments. But now I was much less than human . . . and I would realize my specifically human destiny only if I gave myself over, just as I was doing, to what was not me, to what was still inhuman. (p172-3)"

"As for my Saturday-swaying outside the window in acacias and shadows-I preferred, instead of squandering it, to grasp it in my tight fist, where I crumpled it like a handkerchief. ("The Sharing of Loaves")"

"It was a simple situation, a fact to mention and forget. But if you're imprudent enough to linger an instant longer than you should, a foot sinks in and you're involved. From the instant we venture into it, it's no longer one more fact to tell, we begin to lack the words that would not betray it. At that point, we're in too deep, the fact is no longer a fact and becomes merely its dispersed repercussion. Which, if overly stunted, will one day explode as it did on this Sunday afternoon, when it hasn't rained for weeks and when, like today, beauty desiccated persists nonetheless as beauty."

"This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is "The Murder." And also "How to Kill Cockroaches." So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don't contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights. (beginnning of "A quinta história")"

"He was a being who chose. Among the thousand things he might have been, he had gone along choosing himself. In work for which he wore glasses, discerning whatever he could and using his damp hands to grope at whatever he couldn't see, the being kept choosing and therefore would indirectly choose himself. Bit by bit he had gathered himself into being. He kept separating, separating. (beginning of "Perfil de sêres eleitos")"

"…the greatest obstacle to my progress is me. I myself have been the biggest difficulty in my path. It’s with enormous effort that I’m able to overcome myself."

"Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness."

"There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other."

"we were only made for the little silence, not for the silence of the stars."

"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."

"Oh God! Having just one life was so little."

"Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that's the ultimate thing you can give of yourself."

"I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear."

"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 it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences."

"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")"

"I wasn't actually distracted, my guard was just down, I was being something quite rare: free. (from "Perdoando Deus")"

"The two murmured more than talked: they had just started dating and were giddy, it was love. Love and what comes with it: jealousy. (beginning of "O primeiro beijo" )"