Cris Smith

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Viver - não é? - é muito perigoso. Porque ainda não se sabe. Porque aprender-a-viver é que é o viver, mesmo.”
― João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas

“At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“O mais importante e bonito, do mundo, é isto: que as pessoas não estão sempre iguais, ainda não foram terminadas – mas que elas vão sempre mudando. (...) Natureza da gente não cabe em nenhuma certeza.”
― João Guimarães Rosa, Grande Sertão: Veredas