I always kept a quotation mark to my left and another to my right. Somehow ‘as if it wasn’t me’ was broader than if it were—an inexistent life possessed me entirely and kept me busy like an invention.”
-Clarice Lispector
The Passion According to G.H.
I don’t feel madness in my wish to bite stars, but the earth still exists. And because the first truth is in the earth and the body. If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me. Here I am back at the body. Return to my body. {…} Where does music go when it’s not playing? — she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: may they make a harp of my nerves when I die.”
-Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart
Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter—like the throb of a heart made of jelly.”
-Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye
What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal a myriad of origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
-Ocean Vuong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.”
-bell hooks
All About Love
But to look from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective, to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”
-James Baldwin
Go Tell It on the Mountain
The letters looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing.”
-Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer…”
– José Saramago
Blindness