“But I noticed a first rumble like that of a heart beating beneath the earth. I quietly put my ear to the ground and heard summer forcing its way in and my heart beneath the earth—“nothing! I said nothing!”—and I felt the patient brutality with which the closed earth was opening inside in birth, and I knew with what weight of sweetness the summer was ripening a hundred thousand oranges and I knew that the oranges were mine. Because that is what I wanted.”

—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

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