Will I have to have the courage to use an undefended heart and go on speaking to nothing and no one? as when a child thinks about nothingness. And to run the risk of being crushed by chance. I don’t understand what I saw. I don’t even know if I saw it, since my eyes ended up not being separate from what I saw. Only in an unexpected rippling of the lines, only in an anomaly of in the uninterrupted continuity of my culture did I for an instant experience life-giving death. That purified death that made me sort through the forbidden weft of life. Saying the name of life is forbidden. And I almost said it. I almost couldn’t disentangle myself from its weft, which would have been the destruction of my age inside me.
— Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (tr. Sousa)
Notes from a Room 