Hasibah’s Reviews > Hour of the Star > Status Update

“For that puny creature named Macabéa great nature showed itself only in the form of grass in the sewer—were she given the thick sea or the high peaks of mountains, her soul, even more virgin than her body, would go mad and her organism would explode, arms here, intestines there, her head rolling round and hollow at her feet—as you dismantle a wax dummy.”

“Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if shed learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it's everyone's moment of glory and it's when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.”

“I now see that I forgot to mention that for the time being I read nothing for fear of polluting the simplicity of my language with luxuries.
Since as I said the word has to resemble the word, my instrument. Or am I not a writer? Actually I'm more of an actor because with only one way to punctuate, I juggle with intonation and force another's breathing to accompany my text.”

“Before that, I want to declare that this girl doesn't know herself except from living aimlessly. If she was dumb enough to ask herself "who am I?" she would fall flat on her face. Because "who am I?" creates a need. And how can you satisfy that need? Those who wonder are incomplete.”

“Will this story someday become my own congealing? How do I know. If there's any truth in it—and of course the story is true though invented—may everyone recognize it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold—there are those who lack the delicate essential.”

“All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don't know why, but I do know that the universe never began.”