"For the first time in my life there was a full now. This was the greatest brutality that I had ever come up against. For nowness brings no hope,and nowness brings no future."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"I knew that going in is no sin. But it is perilous, like dying. Just as we die without knowing where we go, and that is a body's greatest courage. To go in was a sin only because it was a condemnation of my own life, and I might never after be able to return to it. Perhaps I already knew that, from those gates onward, there would be no difference between me and the cockroach. Either in my eyes or in the yes of him who is God. That was how I was taking my first steps into nothingness. My first hesitant steps in the direction of Life, and abandoning my own life."
-Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

"Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness in itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction. I loved my fall."
-Augustine, Confessions

"I became to myself a region of destitution."
-Augustine, Confessions