Novelists From Brazil

"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)"

"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."

"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)"

"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)"

"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")"

"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."

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

"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)"

"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."

"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")"

"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)"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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")"

"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)"

"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?"

"(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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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")"

"She sat down in a way that made her own weight "iron" her wrinkled skirt. She smoothed her hair, her blouse. Now, all she could do was wait. (beginning of "Gertrudes pede um conselho")"

"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)"

"If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me. (p59)"

"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."

"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)"

"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")"

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