Jews From Ukraine

"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)"

"The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. (p11)"

"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..."

"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")"

"This thing is the most difficult for a person to understand. Keep trying. Don't get discouraged. It will seem obvious. But it is extremely difficult to know about it. For it involves time. (beginning of "O relatório da coisa")"

"Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object--that's where I'm going. (beginning of the story "É para lá que eu vou")"

"But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today. (p58)"

"I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever. (p55)"

"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)"

"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 don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth. (p14)"

"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)"

"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."

"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" )"

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

"...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")"

"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")"

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"…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."

"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")"

"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")"

"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."

"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")"

"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)"

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

"...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)"

"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)"

"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."

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

"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)"

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

"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)"

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

"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)"

"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."