I try to do what I ought to do, and be the way one ought to be, and to adapt to the world around me – I manage to do it, but at the price of my intimate balance, I feel it…. I go through phases of being irritable, depressed. My memory doesn't exist: I forget things from one room to the next.

[scrawled on top of a newspaper article called 'Volume in the Brain']: Everything touches me – I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.

Clarice Lispector, cited