“I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. …To possess each moment, to link them to my awareness, like tiny filaments, barely perceptible yet strong. Can this be life? Even so, it might elude me. Another way of capturing it would be to live. But the dream is more complete than the reality…What matters in the end: to be alive or to know that one is alive?
What is someone to do who doesn’t know what to do with himself?
….
Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking.
Yet surely those rare moments of self-confidence, of blind existence, of happiness as intense and serene as an organ playing—surely those moments prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this longing which consumes my whole being is not merely some whim?
I must never forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am happy, happier than anyone could hope to be. But I forgot, I was always forgetting.” –Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
