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“We have grown accustomed to living with that knowledge without feeling dizzy every morning, and instead of moving around warily and tentatively, in constant amazement, we behave as if nothing has happened, take the strangeness of it all for granted and get dizzy if life shows itself as it truly is: improbable, unpredictable, remarkable.”
― Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I

“At the same time, Lori had an intuition that, once the early turbulence of the coming intimate celebrations had passed, she'd finally have the experience of the world. She was well aware, she'd finally experience in full the pain of the world. And her own pain as a mortal creature, the pain she'd learned not to feel. But she'd sometimes be swept up by an ecstasy of pure and legitimate pleasure that she could scarcely imagine. Though actually she was starting to imagine it because she felt herself smiling and also felt the kind of bashfulness you feel in the face of something that is too big. To be what you are was too big and uncontrollable.

[...] Her despair came from not even knowing where and how to start. She only knew that she'd started a new thing and could never return to her former dimensions. And she also knew that she should start modestly, in order not to get discouraged. And she knew that she should abandon forever the main road. And go down her true path which was the narrow byways.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“As if she were a painter who had just emerged from an abstract phase, now, without becoming figurative, she had entered a new realism. In this realism each thing at the market had its own importance, connected to a whole — but what was the whole? For as long as she didn't know, she turned her attention to objects and shapes, as if whatever existed were part of an exhibition of painting and sculpture.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“Time is discrete," he said patiently. "It's not a line from the past to the future, as we had thought before. It's more like a system of bubbles that are either vaguely connected or are completely separate from each other.”
― Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra