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Decided to take this book slowly, chapter by chapter, because there’s so much to feel with every line…

“What’s going to happen to me?”
“I don’t know,” he replied after a brief silence.
“Perhaps you will find happiness one day, who knows, a happiness few people will envy you.
I’m not even sure that happiness is the right word. Perhaps you won’t find anyone else who feels as you do, like…”

“She remembered Joana as a little girl looking out to sea: the tranquillity that came from the ox, the sea, the cat. All is one. The confusion stemmed from the entwinement of the sea, the cat and the ox with herself. The confusion also arose because she did not know whether she had discovered 'all is one' when she was still a little girl standing looking out to sea, or later, when she remembered those moments.”

“It now weighed heavily on her stomach and brought a sadness to her body which attached itself to that other sadness — something immovable behind the curtain — with which she had slept and awoken.”

“What do you get when you're happy? I wanted to know: when you're happy what happens? What comes afterwards?”

“Nothing escapes the perfection of things...but this does not explain why I am moved when Otávio coughs and puts his hand to his chest. Ah, pity is what I feel at such moments. Pity is my way of loving. Of hating and communicating. Pity is what sustains me against the world, just as one person lives through desire and another through fear. Pity for the things that happen without my knowing.”

“I couldn't imitate her voice. I couldn't even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous - just any woman's voice. The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.”

“What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It's as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other's misery. But I don't even know the design.”

“I had expected plenty of evidence against her, hadn't I so often caught her out in lies? and now here in writing that I could believe, as I couldn't believe her voice, was the complete answer. It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”

“I would catch her out in small lies, evasions that meant nothing except her fear of me. For every lie I would magnify into a betrayal, and even in the most open statement I would read hidden meanings. Because I couldn't bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand”