Clarice Lispector, from The Hour of the Star
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Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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How can one disguise the simple fact that the entire world is somewhat sad and lonely?
— Clarice Lispector, from The Hour of the Star (New Directions, 1992)
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Sono io
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She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucleus of — of ecstasy, let’s say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn’t know that she was meditating because she didn’t know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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I am only true when I’m alone.
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
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"Should I say that she was crazy about soldiers? Well she was. Whenever she saw one, she thought with a shiver of pleasure: is he going to kill me?"
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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Clarice Lispector, from The Hour of the Star
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And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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"She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life."
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But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of the soul. She knew that there were a lot of things she didn't know how to understand.
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
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