10 Quotes by Benjamin Moser

As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.

There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.

Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.

I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.

A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.

Brasília é, na verdade, paisagem. "Se tirassem meu retrato em pé em Brasilia, quando revelassem a fotografia só sairia a paisagem", escreveu Clarice Lispector num famoso ensaio sobre a capital; e, de fato, a paisagem é tão opressora que encontrar-se preso em todo esse espaço é tão aterrorizante quanto ficar trancado numa sala pequena sem janelas.

A ameaça, no Brasil, era sempre interna. (..) A polícia invadia as favelas; os favelados invadiam as praias; os agricultores sem terra invadiam fazendas' fazendeiros invadiam reservas ambientais; colonos invadiam reservas indígenas. A invasão incessante explicava por que os brasileiros morriam numa quantidade que, na maioria dos países, só seria atingida pelo rastro de uma terrível epidemia - ou por uma guerra feroz contra um adversário estrangeiro. O Brasil invadia-se a si mesmo.

Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.

Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent – what a rare relief.