Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

Johnny Lorenz

"A mystical mediation on creation and death in which a man (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) infuses the "breath of life" into his creation [and] forms a dialogue between the god-like author and the speaking, breathing, dying creature herself: Angela Pralini"--P. [4] of cover.

A Breath of Life

smile??

The people I love, in my experience, always end up loving one another.

a passage in the introduction about clarice's mother, and the context in which clarice was born into

[...] in that period of war, starvation, and racial persecution, her mother had been raped in a pogrom by Russian soldiers, and that she had consequentially contracted syphilis, which was then incurable.

According to the folk superstitions of the remote area where they lived, a woman with syphilis could be cured by pregnancy. And so that's what her parents did.

The result of this attempt to save her mother was Clarice Lispector herself. For her mother, however, the pregnancy cured nothing. And Clarice, for the first nine years of her life, was forced to watch her mother agonizing, paralyzed, exiled, dying.

Feeling the guilt of having failed in her attempt to cure her mother, the girl started telling stories in which an angel, a saint, a god, came to cure her. These stories failed.

The tragedy is the origin of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. And until the very end of her life—until 

—she never lost the hope of repairing the world through mystic means.

from the introduction. some of clarice's last words before she died

"Let's pretend that we're not going to the hospital, that I'm not sick, and that we're going to Paris."

[...] Needless to say, she never went to Paris: she died six weeks later.

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.

Today is today. I'm stunned and at the same time suspicious that I've been given so much. And tomorrow I shall once again have a today.

I wanted to write a book. But where are the words? all the meanings have been exhausted.

To know when to quit. Whether to give up—this is often the question facing the gambler. No one is taught the art of walking away. And the anguish of deciding if I should keep playing is hardly unusual. Will I be able to quit honorably? or am I the type who waits stubbornly for something to happen? something like, for instance, the end of the world? or whatever it might be, maybe my own sudden death, in which case my decision to give up would be beside the point.

I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried knows.

I want every sentence of this book to be a climax.

I don't make literature: I simply live in the passage of time. The act of writing is the inevitable result of my being alive.

A Breath of Life quotes

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