Jews From Ukraine

"Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. (p144)"

"He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith. (p141)"

"...danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life."

"Braiding the words into schemes, breaths of life. With your hands, extended like a word that travels and burns like a word inhabited by birds and oaks that is how you are Clarice, all stretched out and beautiful."

"Clarice Lispector has been, without doubt, one of the most original and extraordinary voices of Brazilian literature and of Latin American literature generally. Since her death, she has become a literary icon, not only in Latin America, but in Europe as well, especially thanks to the work of the feminist critic Helene Cixous. Lispector's literary presence has been reaffirmed in the last ten years, and not just because of her death, but rather because of her exquisitely sensirive prose."

"What remains constant is the intimate physicality of Clarice's voice-its strong rhythms and the way she seems to be whispering in your ear like a sister, mother, and lover, somehow touching you from far away. Part of her rhythm comes from a fondness for repetition: refrains that produce an incantatory feel or thematic crescendo, anaphoric structures that lend a biblical tone, the slapstick effect of a repeated catchphrase, or the compulsive reiterations of an obsessive mind, like Laura's in "The Imitation of the Rose." Her words hold onto a sensory coherence, even when their semantic logic threatens to come undone. Clarice inspires big feelings. As with "the rare thing herself" from "The Smallest Woman in the World," those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can claim the key to her entirely, not even in the Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways."

"Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self’s light."

"Clarice Lispector spent the first two months of her life in the town of Chechelnik in Ukraine. This is a small, short fact. The interesting question, unanswered in the places I've looked for it, is: At what age did she enter the Portuguese language? And how much Russian did she bring with her? Any Yiddish? Sometimes I think this is what her work is about . . . one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there's hospitality, sometimes a quarrel"

"(There isn't a mean bone in the body of Lispector's work.) But there is sadness, aloneness (which is a little different than loneliness). Some of the characters try desperately to get out of the stories. Others retreat into their own fictions-seem to be waiting and relieved by Lispector's last embracing sentence. Lispector was lucky to have begun to think about all these lives (men's lives as well as women's) in the early years of the women's movement, that is, at a time when she found herself working among the scrabbly low tides of that movement in the ignorance which is often essential to later understanding. That historical fact is what has kept her language crooked and clean."

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

"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."

"Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O'Brien, Borges, and Pessoa utterly original and brilliant. haunting and disturbing."

"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."

"“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.”"

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

"Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. (p52)"

"The proof that I'm recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic. (p45)"

"I'm not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality. (p43)"

"Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? (p43)"

"beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. (p37)"

"I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void. (p36)"

"I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. (p29)"

"I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)"

"What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance. (p27)"

"“At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing. (p25)"

"I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest. (p12)"

"What is written here...are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me. These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins. (p11)"

"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)"

"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'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well. (p5)"

"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."

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

"I want to know, what will that matter after I die? (Well, the main value it has is that your name will remain in Brazilian literature.) CL: You think it will? I don’t write for posterity."

"(You even said that your liberation would be being able not to write.) CL: Of course! Writing is a burden!"

"(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."

"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 never felt a violent impact from a book?) CL: A bit, sometimes. I felt it with “Crime and Punishment,” by Dostoyevsky, which gave me a real fever. “Steppenwolf” turned me upside down."

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

"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 never know beforehand what I’m going to write. There are writers who start writing only when they have the book in their head. Not me. I just follow along, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up. Then I start understanding what I wanted."

"I don’t write as a catharsis, to get something off my chest. I never got anything off my chest in a book. That’s what friends are for. I want the thing itself."

"I don’t reread. It nauseates me. When it’s published, it’s like a dead book—I don’t want to hear anything more about it. And, when I read it, I think it’s weird, I think it’s bad, that’s why I don’t read it. I also don’t read the translations that they do of my books, in order not to get annoyed."

"(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."

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

"Without yet realizing that, for me, form and meaning are one single thing. The phrase arrives already made."

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

"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 born in Ukraine, but already fleeing. My parents stopped in a village that’s not even on the map, called Chechelnik, for me to be born, and came to Brazil, where I arrived when I was two months old. So calling me a foreigner is nonsense. I’m more Brazilian than Russian, obviously."

"Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human? (p7 Benjamin Moser translation)"

"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)"