"The secret harmony of disharmony. I don't want what is already made but what is torturously in the making. My unbalanced words are the luxury of my silence. I write in acrobatic, aerial pirouettes- I write because I passsionately want to speak. Even though writing is only giving me the great measure of silence."

"Will I be able to deliver myself over to the expectant silence that comes after an answerless question?"

"I'm afraid of myself because I know how to paint horror, I, creature of echoing caverns that I am."

"Only what I capture in myself, when, as it is now, it's being transposed into writing, as the despair of words occupying more instants than a glance."

"Do I have the courage? For the time being I do: because I come from long suffering, I come from the hell of love, but now I'm free of you. I come from far away- from a weighty ancestry. I, who come from the pain of living. And don't want it anymore. I want the vibrancy of joy. I want the sovereignty of Mozart. But I also want inconsequence. Freedom? It's my final refuge, I have forced myself toward freedom and bear it not like a gift but with heroism. I am heroically free."

"I, who am all this, must, because of fate and tragic destiny, know and experience only the echoes of myself, for I do not capture my real self."

"A dangerous balance, mine, the danger of my soul's death. Today's night looks at me with torpor, verdigris and enticement. I want inside this night which is longer than life, I want, inside this night, raw, bloody life full of saliva. I want the following word: splendor. Splender is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself. But my essence is always hidden. I am implicit."

"I am death. It comes within my very being...I live in a stratum underlying feeling: I'm barely living...I renounce having a meaning, and then sweet, painful exhaustion takes over."

"My deep anonymity, that no one has ever touched."

"No one is me. No one is you. This is solitude."

"I ask if you can stand it that time is today and now and this very instant."

"And I defy death. I- I am my own death."

"I am making myself. I'll make myself until I reach the core."

"There are those dying of hunger and all I can do is be born."

"Why all this uneasiness? Because I'm not living the only way that there is for a person to live and I don't even know what it is...I've looked into myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented."

"To create a being from oneself is something very serious. I'm creating myself. And walking in complete darkneess in search of ourselves is what we do. It hurts. But its labor pain: something is being born that is."

"I want to die with life. I swear I shalll only die taking full advantage of the final moment...I wanted so much to die of health. Like someone who explodes."

"There's nothing more difficult than to surrender yourself to the instant. This difficulty is human pain."

"I trust my incomprehesion, which has given me a life free of understanding, I've lost friends, I don't understand death. The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live onseelf."

"There are some things I don't want to tell even to myself. It would betray the it-is. I feel that I know some truths. That I already anticipate them. But truths do not have words."

"Even for unbelievers there is the instant of despair which is divine: the absence of God is a religious act."

"I'm restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I jsut don't know how to use love. Sometmes it tears at my flesh, like barbs."

"Then I accept the worst and go into the core of death and for this I'm alive."

"I become exhausted at the Botanical Gardens."

"Pain is exacerbated life. The process hurts. Coming-into-being is a slow, slow, good pain. It's a full stretching to the point where the person can stretch no more."

"I've only dreamed the world but have never seen it."

"It's very good that things don't depend on me."

"The courage to live: I leave hidden what needs to be hidden and what needs to spread out in secret. I fall silent. Because I don't know my secret. Tell me yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us."

"Here I am, hard and silent and heroic...All lives are heroic lives."

"My hope is to feel voracious toward the future...I pretend to believe and live, from yesterday to today."

"But if I wait for understanding to accept things- the act of surrender will never take place. I have to take the plunge all at once, the plunge that embraces comprehension and above all incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is give myself over."

"To live this life is more an indirect remembering of it than a direct living. It seems like a gentle convalescence from something that could have been absolutely terrible."

"But we almost understand each other in that casual discordance, in that almost that's the only way of bearing life at its fullest, since a blunt face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us."

"I lose the identity of the world within me and I exist without guarantees."

"My astonishing truth is that I was always alone, separate from you and I didn't know it. Now I know; I'm alone. I and my freedom, which I don't know how to use. Huge responsibilities of solitude. Those who are not lost do not know freedom and do not love it. As for me, I take up my solitude."

"Still I refuse to take on any mission. I carry out nothing: I just live."

"I'm unexpectedly fragmentary. I'm little by little. My story is to live. And I'm not afraid of failure. Let failure annihilate me. I want the glory of falling."

"When I think of what I've already lived, it seems to me that I was leaving my bodies all along the way."

"Like the fortunteller's crystal ball, it drags me into the void which, for the fortuneteller, is a field of meditation, and in me is the field of silences upon silences."

"Anyone who looks into a mirror, who succeeds in seeing it without seeing himself, who understands that its depth consists of its being empty, who walks inside its transparent space without leaving in it a trace of his own image- that someone has thn perceived its mystery as thing...he saw the mirror as it is. And he discovered the enormous, frozen spaces in himself, interrupted only by a bock of ice here or there. A mirror is cold and ice. But there's a succession of darknesses within it."

"And when life strikes me as odd, that's where life begins."

"But I'm going to have to stop because I'm so very tired that only death would relieve me of this weariness."

"I'm finding myself in my very self: and this is fatal because only death will complete me. But I'll hold out to the end. I'll tell you a secret- life is fatal. I'm going to have to interrupt everything to tell you the following: death is the impossible and the intangible. To such an extent is death only a future even that there are those who can't stand it and commit suicide. It's as if life said the following: and there simply wasn't any following. Only the colon, waiting. We keep this secret in muteness to hide the fact that every instant is fatal."

"Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don't totally obey: if i have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There's something inside of me that hurts...What saves me is the scream."

"Beatitude begins at the moment when the act of thinking frees itself from the need for form."

"Sleeping is abstracting oneself and scattering into nothingness."

"I'm the one who's listening to the whistle in the dark. I'm the one who's ill from the human condition. I rebel: I don't want to be a person anymore. Who? who has pity on us who know about life and death."

"I refuse to be vanquished: therefore I love. As an answer...Besides, I don't want to die. I rebel against "God." Shall we not die as a challenge?

"I need to understand while I'm alive, do you hear? because afterward it will be too late."

"Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep- living is upsetting. You can't walk around naked, either in body or in spirit. Didn't I tell you life presses in?"


from The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector