“I am at the window, and only this happens: I see the rain with benevolent eyes, and the rain sees me, and all is in harmony. We are both busy flowing. How long will my condition last? I notice that, with this question, I finger my pulse to feel where the painful throbbing of before should be. And I see that there is no painful throbbing.

Only this: it rains, and I watch the rain. What simplicity. I never thought that the world and I would reach this point. The rain falls, not because it needs me, and I look at the rain, not because I need it. But we are as united as the water of the rain is to the rain. And I am not giving thanks for anything. If shortly after birth I hadn’t taken, involuntarily, by compulsion, the road I took—I would have always been what in fact I really am: a country girl in a field where it is raining. Not even thanking God or nature. The rain too expresses no gratitude. I am not a thing that is thankful for having been transformed into something else. I am a woman, I am a person, I am an attention. I am a body looking out through the window. Just as the rain is not grateful for not being a stone. It is rain. Perhaps it is this that might be called being alive. No more than this, but this: alive. And alive just through gentle gladness.”

Clarice Lispector, Soulstorm

Clarice, via booksvscig  / mostly because im reading a new translation of Clarice:

"that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf"...