A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector

Author:Clarice Lispector [Lispector, Clarice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2012-06-21T04:00:00+00:00

How Can You Transform

Everything into a Daydream?

AUTHOR: The fact is more important than the text.

Facts trip me up. That is why I am now going to write about not-facts, that is, about things and their gaudy mystery.

The sensation of writing is curious. When I write I’m not thinking about the reader or myself: then I am — but only from me — I am the words strictly speaking.

ANGELA: I like words. Sometimes a random and scentillating phrase occurs to me, without having anything to do with the rest of me. From now on I’m going to write in this diary, on days when there’s nothing else to do, phrases almost on the edge of meaninglessness but that sound like words of love. Saying meaningless words is my great freedom. It matters little to me to be understood, I want the impact of dazzling syllables, I want the noxiousness of a bad word. Everything is in the word. What I’d give, however, not to have this mistaken desire to write. I feel like I’m being pushed. By whom?

I want to write with words so completely stuck together that there are no gaps between them and me.

I want to write really angry. As for me, I’m from far away. Very far. And from me comes the pure smell of kerosene.

AUTHOR: The word is the defecation of the thought. It glistens.

Every book is blood, it’s pus, it’s excrement, it’s heart torn to shreds, it’s nerves cut to pieces, it’s electric shock, it’s coagulated blood running like boiling lava down the mountain.

ANGELA: Oh I no longer want to express myself with words: I want to do so with “I-kiss-you.”

AUTHOR: I occasionally, I who am writing, seek for every word the unconscious pop of a mortifying feeling.

ANGELA: I want to write and can’t do it. I want to write a story called: “A Foot.” And another called: “You’re So Severe.” In what I write is there nothing between the lines? If that’s the case, I’m lost.

The novel I want to write would be “It’s Like Trying to Remember. And Not Being Able.”

“There’s a book inside all of us,” they say. And maybe that’s why I wanted to expel from me a book that I’d write if I had the talent, and also the perseverance.

I’m feeling like a mermaid out of water. On one half of me the scales are jewels shining in the sun of life. For I came out of the sea into life. And I wriggle my body atop a large rock combing my long salty hair. I don’t know why I wrote that, I think it’s so I won’t forget to take note of something.

I don’t write, for I’m lazy and fluttering. I want to live so much and I think that writing isn’t living. That it’s enough to feel. I can’t do anything for myself in this sense: I’ve already freed myself from my typewriter and demand to be left to my destiny.

AUTHOR: I don’t write because I want to, no. I write because I must.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.