thirdity:

“Nascent pleasure hurts our chest so much that we prefer to feel the pain we are used to rather than unaccustomed pleasure. There is no possible explanation for true happiness, it defies understanding — it resembles the beginning of some irrecoverable loss. That total fusion is unbearably good — as if death were our final, greatest good, except that it isn’t death, it is life so incommensurable that it resembles the grandeur of death. One should allow oneself to be flooded by happiness only very gradually — because it is life being born.”

— Clarice Lispector, Too Much of Life