60 phrases from Brazilian writers to fall in love with our literature

Even when everything seems to fall apart, it’s up to me to decide between laughing or crying, going or staying, giving up or fighting; because I discovered, in the uncertain path of life, that the most important thing is to decide.

Cora Coralina

I try to bear every day my own renewed personality, falling down inside me, everything that is old and dead.

Cora Coralina

More hope in my steps than sadness on my shoulders.

Cora Coralina

True courage is going after your dreams even when everyone says they are impossible.

Cora Coralina

The knowledge you learn from the masters. Wisdom, only with the commonplace of life.

Cora Coralina

Don’t raise the sword over the head of the one who asked you for forgiveness.

Machado de Assis

Life without struggle is a dead sea at the center of the universal organism.

Machado de Assis

It is better, much better, to be content with reality; if it isn’t as brilliant as dreams, it at least has the advantage of existing.

Machado de Assis

Some things are born of others, tangle, untie, get confused, get lost, and time goes by without losing itself.

Machado de Assis

Time is an invisible chemical, which dissolves, composes, extracts and transforms all moral substances.

Machado de Assis

I love you even if it fulminates you or if a punch in my face makes me less bone and more truth.

Hilda Hilst

You never really know people. Human beings are even the most unpredictable of animals.

Hilda Hilst

If you are consistent with yourself, the rest is bearable. I support.

Hilda Hilst

Willingness to give no meaning to things, words and life itself. As is life in reality without meaning.

Hilda Hilst

There are dreams that must be re-dreamed, projects that cannot be forgotten.

Hilda Hilst

Living to hate a person is the same as spending a lifetime devoted to them.

Guimarães Rosa

If every animal inspires tenderness, then what happened to men?

Guimarães Rosa

I almost do not know anything. But I suspect a lot.

Guimarães Rosa

I wanted to get out of everything I was, to enter a better destiny.

Guimarães Rosa

Things change in the slow fast of times.

Guimarães Rosa

Love doesn’t end. It’s like the world is waiting for me. And I go to meet what awaits me.

Clarice Lispector

But there is life that is to be lived intensely. There is love. It has to be lived to the last drop. No fear. Do not kill.

Clarice Lispector

I am eternally passionate about words, music and whole people. I don’t care your last name, where you were born, how much you carry in your pocket. Empty people are boring and give me sleep.

Clarice Lispector

Decipher me, but don’t conclude me, I may surprise you.

Clarice Lispector

I do not remember what was our beginning. I know that we did not start from the beginning. It was love before it was.

Clarice Lispector

But I will try, as he advised, because the important thing is to try, even the impossible.

Jorge Amado

Humor is not a youth thing. The young person has creative power, elan, passion, enthusiasm and drive, something you have less of later. Then you have the experience, and the humor is from the experience.

Jorge Amado

Poetry is not in the verses, sometimes it is in the heart. And it’s such. To the point of not being able to fit into words.

Jorge Amado

Capitalism remains the same fragile and unjust system, producing wars, misery, based on profit, on the lust for money. These are very miserable reasons.

Jorge Amado

Freedom is like the sun. It is the greatest good in the world.

Jorge Amado

Formerly what oppressed man was the word Calvary; today is salary.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

Rich children play in the gardens with their favorite toys. And poor children accompany their mothers begging in the streets. What tragic inequalities and what a joke of fate.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

We have only one way to be born and many ways to die.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

I pick up paper, but I don’t like it. So I think: pretend I’m dreaming.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

I write about the misery and the unfortunate life of the favelados. I was angry, I didn’t believe in anyone. I hated politicians and bosses, because my dream was to write and the poor cannot have a noble ideal. I knew I was going to make enemies, because nobody is used to that kind of literature. It’s in God’s hands. I wrote reality.

Carolina Maria de Jesus

I am overly moved, by nature and by profession. I think it’s dreadful for someone to live without passions.

Graciliano Ramos

There is no talent that can resist the ignorance of the language.

Graciliano Ramos

She cried, but she was invisible, and no one noticed her crying.

Graciliano Ramos

If the only thing that man will be sure of is death; the only certainty for Brazilians is Carnival next year.

Graciliano Ramos

The water washes everything away, the most serious wounds heal.

Graciliano Ramos

I have phases, like the Moon; phases of being alone, phases of being alone.

Cecília Meireles

Freedom is a word that the human dream feeds, there is no one who explains it and no one who doesn’t understand.

Cecília Meireles

The more I fall apart, the more whole and calm I feel.

Cecília Meireles

Above us, around us, words fly and sometimes land.

Cecília Meireles

I learned from the springs to let myself be cut and to always come back in one piece.

Cecília Meireles

No one is equal to anyone. Every human being is a unique stranger.

Carlos Drummond deAndrade

There are two seasons in life, childhood and old age, when happiness is in a box of chocolates.

Carlos Drummond deAndrade

Watch where you walk, it’s about my dreams you walk.

Carlos Drummond deAndrade

And every moment is different, and every man is different, and we are all the same. In the same womb the initial darkness, in the same land the global silence, but not soon.

Carlos Drummond deAndrade

What do we live on if not on passions?

Carlos Drummond deAndrade

My god, when will the school change, and if it doesn’t change where all these people go after, are they the world, are adults these people?

Mariana Salomão Carrara

Heaven keeps the living part of the person, that thing that never dies, not nostalgia, nostalgia is love and it belongs to the living, I’m talking about the living thing that stays in the dead.

Aline Bei

I’m going to fool myself once again, pretending that I love you sometimes, as if I didn’t love you always.

Tati Bernardi

When you want something, the whole universe conspires to make you want it.

Paulo Coelho

My grandfather didn’t like August. It said August month of heartbreak. When it passed, it said now I don’t die anymore.

Angelica Freitas

There is today for so much yesterday.

Paulo Leminski

.Beautiful is to blossom in the midst of the teachings imposed by power. Beautiful is blooming in the midst of hatred, envy, lies or society’s garbage. It’s beautiful to smile or love when a waterfall of tears covers our soul! Beautiful is being able to say yes and move forward.

Eliane Potiguara

Kill, kill, kill… Transitive verb requiring bloodied direct object.

Paulo Lins

I love you and I’m sure that even though you’ve been through so many bad things in life, you still have a million happy endings inside.

Victor Martins

He gets used to it to avoid wounds, bleeding, to dodge the knife and the bayonet, to spare his chest. People get used to saving life. That little by little wears out, and that, with so much getting used to it, it loses itself.

Marina Colasanti