“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.

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

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.