“… everything around her was so alive and tender, the dirty street, the old trams, orange peels—strength flowed back and forth through her heart in weighty abundance. She was very pretty just then, so elegant; in step with her time and the city where she’d been born as if she had chosen it. In her cross-eyed look anyone could sense the enjoyment this woman took in the things of the world. She stared at other people boldly, trying to fasten on to those mutable figures her pleasure…"

-Clarice Lispector, "Family Ties" ("Os laços de família")

“We’re here under conditions, and you either accept them or fight them, but the conditions aren’t going to change at all. So you can either accept the conditions as they are, or fight them and bitch about them all the time, but you’re not going to change the conditions, so you might as well accept them.”

-Annie Dillard on aging, in conversation with David Remnick.