lygia fagundes telles
Lygia Fagundes Telles (born April 19, 1923) is a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in São Paulo and is one of Brazil's most important living writers.
Her first book of short stories, Praia Viva (Living Beach), was published in 1944. In 1949 got the Afonso Arinos award for her short stories book O Cacto Vermelho (Red Cactus). Among her most successful books are Ciranda de Pedra (The Marble Dance) (1954), Verão no Aquário (1963), Antes do Baile Verde (1970), Seminário dos Ratos (1977) and As Horas Nuas, (1989). The book Antes do Baile Verde won the Best Foreign Women Writers Grand Prix in Cannes (France) in 1969.
Her most famous novel is As Meninas (The Girl in the Photograph), which tells the story of three young women in the early 1970s, a hard time in the political history of Brazil due to the repression by the military dictatorship. In 2005 she won the Camões Prize, the greatest literary award in the Portuguese language.[1]
She is one of the three female members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
From Wikipedia
“Ontem um velhinho de oitenta e dois anos atravessou o Canal da Mancha, vupt! vupt! nadando. A múmia chegou inteira e ainda pediu um conhaque.”
“...queria saber apenas para onde vão os piolhos dos decapitados. Um enigma.”
“Tinha um velho que morreu agarrando o pinto, acho que ficou com medo da morte, o pobrezinho, tanto medo e na hora do medo agarrou o pinto. Foi enterrado assim.”
“Sentei-me no chão roendo os sequilhos e chorando porque queria a minha mãe, não a que saiu de mantilha mas a que ficou no retrato.”
“Think of something useless, and that's probably what I'll be doing. Listen, Virginia, we need to love the useless. We need to raise pigeons without a thought of eating them, plant rose bushes without expecting to pick roses, write without aiming at publication. We need to do things without expecting benefits in return. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but it's in the curving paths that the best things are found. . . . We must love the useless, because there is beauty in uselessness.”
“ô literatura! Por que as coisas nos parecem sempre belas quando protegidas pela distância?”
“E besouro que cai de costas não se levanta nunca mais.”