“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”

The pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent – what a rare relief.

I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.

It’s one thing if everyone wears the same shoes or drinks the same soda. But the world of literature is the last place in which globalization should mean homogeneity.

Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane.

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

My hobbies just sort of gradually became my vocation.

I love music; my dad and brother were very musical, and music just happens to be one of my hobbies that became my vocation.

We believe in the vocation of communion and participation of our people,

This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man’s entire existence.

Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.