Clarice Lispector

"Martin is convinced that he has murdered his wife. In a delirium of guilt and grief, he wanders through a forest until he comes across an isolated farm run by Vitoria - an indomitable spinster who is 'afraid to live', and her flighty, obsessive cousin Ermelinda, who is terrified of death. As Martin works on Vitoria's land he is both haunted and comforted by memories of his wife and son." "In the intense heat of the Brazilian summer, drought threatens both the farm and its inhabitants, and these three very different but equally domineering characters provoke each other into a realisation of their individual psychological isolation." --Book Jacket.

The Apple in the Dark

Lukas

That thing without a name that is the scent of the earth disquieting him hotly and recalling with insistence, who knows why, that we are born to love, and then you don't understand yourself.

if in an instant we are born, and we die in an instant, an instant is enough for a whole life 

he was a man, but there was still something that was unsettled: what is a man supposed to do? 

[…] and if we hardly fit, the truth is we do fit. What will we do? we’ll construct with the same little rocks another  definitive organization, knocking down the frst one beforehand? Or will we make up our mind sensibly to fit into the first one? It’s true that in order to fit into the first one, we can't eat much. Since if we get fat, we won’t fit, and if we grow we won't fit, and we’ll end up with trousers that are too short, looking meditatively at our exposed feet.

We don’t know where we come from and we don’t know where we’re going, but we experience, we experience! and that’s what we’ve got,[…],that‘s what we’ve got! 

Martin had fallen so far into himself that he didn’t recognize himself [..] Who was he? He had the intuitive certainty that we’re nothing like what we think we are and we are what he was being now, one day after being born we invent ourselves-but we are what he was now. 

 And the criminal felt so much fear that for the first time he understood in all its inexpressible meaning what was meant by salvation.

In a light despair of happiness she looked at the field and the weeds and the flies: and everything was making itself by itself, everything had the wisdom of living. But she - she didn’t know how to make herself. 

“I always got what I wanted.” Yes, somehow you always did. And I, what did I get? I got experience, which is that thing for which we are born; and profound freedom is in experience. 

The Apple in the Dark quotes

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