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"Her mind feels porous, the memories from before leaking through easier than ever before, and she doesn't like it. For years she's kept them at bay, held them behind her new life. [...] Those blocks feel less solid now, more like a patchwork quilt coming apart at the stitches."

— Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Leila and the Blue Fox

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"All of those memories have the texture of dreams."

— Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Leila and the Blue Fox

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"I use stray words that are in themselves a free dart: savages, barbarians, decadent noblemen and gangsters. Does that mean anything to you? It speaks to me.

But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is.

I am at its core.

I still am.

I am at the living and soft centre.

Still.

It sparkles and is elastic. Like the gait of a glossy black panther that I saw and that walked softly, slowly and dangerously.

[...]

In the core where I am, in the core of the Is, I ask no questions. Because when it is—it is. I am only limited by my identity."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"I live from an underlying layer of feelings: I am barely alive."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"To interpret myself and formulate me I need new signs and new articulations in shapes found on this side and beyond my human story. I transfigure reality and then another dreaming and sleepwalking reality, creates me. And all of me rolls and as I roll on the ground I add to myself in leaves, I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. And then? then all that I lived will be a poor superfluity.

But for the time being I am in the centre of everything that screams and teems. And it's subtle as the most intangible reality. For now time is the duration of a thought."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"I follow the tortuous path of roots bursting the earth, I have a gift for passion, in the bonfire of a dry trunk I contort in the blaze. To the span of my existence I give an occult meaning that goes beyond me. I'm a concomitant being: I gather in me time past, the present and the future, the time that pulses in the tick-tock of the clocks."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"Sleepless, almost completely; plagued by dreams, as if they were being scratched into me, into a reluctant material."

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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"The power to say no, this most natural expression of the perpetually changing, renewing, dying reviving human fighting organism, is some thing we always have, but not the courage, although living is saying no, thus saying no saying yes."

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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"He sought help in the forests, he almost leaped through the foothills, he hurried to the sources of the brooks that encountered him, he struck the air with his hands, he panted through nose and mouth."

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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"What are you? I am miserable."

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka

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"Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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"With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand... hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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"But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time..."

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

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"Could I have gone without feeling it to the other side? The other side is a throbbingly hellish life. But there is the transfiguration of my terror: so I give myself over to a heavy life all in symbols heavy as ripe fruits. I choose mistaken resemblances but that drag me through the tangle. A trace memory of the common sense of my past keeps me brushing against this side here. Help me because something is coming toward me and laughing at me. Quick, save me.

But no one can give me their hand to help me out: I must use great strength—and in the nightmare, with a sudden wrench, I finally fall face-down on this side here. I let myself lie tossed upon the rustic earth, exhausted, heart still beating madly, breathing in great retchings. Am I safe? I wipe my damp brow. I get up slowly, try to take the first steps of a weak convalescence. I'm managing to get my balance."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"I shall pass to the other side of life. How can I tell you this? It's terrible and threatens me. I feel that I can no longer stop and I'm scared. I try to distract myself from the fear. But the real hammering stopped long ago: I'm being the incessant hammering in me. From which I must free myself. But I can't: the other side of me calls me. The footsteps I hear are my own."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"And I who have barely started my journey, I start it with a sense of tragedy, guessing toward which lost ocean my steps of life are leading. And madly I take control of the recesses of myself, my ravings suffocate me with so much beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never."

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (The Stream of Life)

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"To forget everything. To open windows. To empty the room. The wind blows through it. One sees only the emptiness, one searches in all corners and does not find oneself."

— Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka