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Some Favourite Quotes

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” — Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." — Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“To write is something akin to loving; we never have experience in love, always loving for the first time and in risk.” (my translation) —Mia Couto

“E lhe veio uma saudade de Deus. Saudade de entrar num domingo e acreditar que ninguém morria porque era dia santo. Pudesse ela reentrar nesse encantamento que experimentara na inauguração da primeira capela.” — Mia Couto, O Outro Pé da Sereia

“They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong.” — Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory

"A alma humana é como a água: ela vem do Céu e volta para o Céu, e depois retorna à Terra, num eterno ir e vir.“ — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Soul wants time and patience to confer loveliness; it wants to be wooed and longs to find the face of the Beloved in the gardens of the city.” — John Terrant, The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul and the Spiritual Life

"She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing "yes" in the sky." — Monique Duval

"Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names." — Toni Morrison, Nobel Speech

“Esta biografia é um destino humano que procura o seu ocaso entre animais e plantas, sem a glória desejada na infância. Esse desejo não desapareceu, mais foi moderado pela força das circunstâncias e a abertura a outras vivências do mundo.” — Maria Gabriela Llansol, Um Arco Singular: Livros de Horas II

“I am listening to you not on the basis of what I know, I feel, I already am, nor in terms of what the world and language already are, thus in a formalistic manner, so to speak. I am listening to you rather as the revelation of a truth that has yet to manifest itself – yours and that of the world revealed through and by you. I give you a silence in which your future – and perhaps my own, but with you and not as you and without you – may emerge and lay its foundation.  This is not a hostile or restrictive silence. It is openness that nothing or no one occupies, or preoccupies – no language, no world, no God. This silence is space-time offered to you with no a priori, no pre-established truth or ritual… A silence that is the primary gesture of I love to you. Without it, the “to,” such as I understand it, is impossible.” — Luce Irigaray, I Love to You

"There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys..." — Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Não imaginava a morte como o fim da vida de si mesma, mas a continuação sob a forma desconhecida de metamorfoses de outros ocultos fenómenos, vistos sob a perspectiva da viagem infinita.” — Maria Gabriela Llansol, Um Arco Singular: Livros de Horas II