Quote by Clarice Lispector: “It's not courage, it's lack of options.”

We celebrate people for being brave, but often what looks like courage is just the absence of any other viable path. When you have no safe exit, moving forward isn't heroism — it's the only thing left. This is a more honest account of how most people survive.

Lispector spent her final years in Rio de Janeiro as Brazil remained under military dictatorship. Her late work became increasingly spare and aphoristic, as though stripping language down to its bones. She died in December 1977, just one day before her fifty-seventh birthday.

Brazilian novelist and short story writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin, widely considered the most significant Jewish writer in Brazilian history and one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in any language. Her 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. is a landmark of Brazilian modernist fiction.