I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

– Clarice Lispector

I’ll be reading these stories between other books and well into 2022.

Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector @ Bookshop

Quotes

In the morning she’d awake haloed by her calm duties.

The breeze insinuated itself among the flowers. Ana sensed rather than smelled its sweetish scent… The Garden was so pretty that she was afraid of Hell.

Her initial impulse, when realizing her mistake, was to re trace her steps and go back home until they had passed: “they’re going to look at me, I know it, there’s no one else for them to look at and they’re going to stare at me!” But how could she turn back and flee, if she had been born for adversity. Since all her slow preparation had an unknown destiny that she, out of de votion, must obey. How could she retreat, and then never again forget the shame of having waited miserably behind a door?

And anyway maybe there wasn’t any danger. They wouldn’t have the nerve to say anything because she’d stride firmly past, jaw set, with her Spanish rhythm.

He no longer heard doors slamming, the neighbor’s piano, his mother talking on the phone. There was a great silence in his room, as in a vault. And the waning afternoon seemed like morning. He was far away, far away, like a giant who could be outside with just his fingers inside the room and leave them absorbed in twirling a pencil around and around. Sometimes his breathing became labored like an old man’s. Most of the time, though, his face barely grazed the bedroom air.