Top 100 Clarice Lispector Quotes
#1. And one of the things I learned is that one should live in spite of. Although, one should eat. Although, one should love. Although, it must die. Even it is often the same even though it pushes us forward. It was despite the fact that it gave me an unhappy anguish that was the creator of my own life.
Clarice Lispector
#3. Perhaps love is to give one's own solitude to others? For it is the very last thing we have to offer.
from "The Gift
Clarice Lispector
#4. I don't know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.
Clarice Lispector
#5. Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting
Clarice Lispector
#6. Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world's wisdom could be contained & lost.
Clarice Lispector
#7. Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. There is a time when you must take a picture of yourself. Hunger is always the same as the first hunger. The need renews itself empty and entire.
Clarice Lispector
#8. The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
Clarice Lispector
#10. If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy.
Clarice Lispector
#13. Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.
Clarice Lispector
#14. Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought ... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.
Clarice Lispector
#15. I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.
Clarice Lispector
#16. I'm in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.
Clarice Lispector
#17. I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not
Clarice Lispector
#18. God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted.
Clarice Lispector
#19. Everything struck her at times as too precious, impossible to touch. And, at times, what people used as air to breathe, was weight and death for her.
Clarice Lispector
#20. but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.
Clarice Lispector
#21. Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace - call it passion.
Clarice Lispector
#22. I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten.
Clarice Lispector
#23. As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.
Clarice Lispector
#24. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
Clarice Lispector
#25. It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it.
Clarice Lispector
#26. It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.
Clarice Lispector
#27. I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.
Clarice Lispector
#28. Why publish what is worthless? Perhaps the worthy is also worthless. Besides, what is obviously worthless has always fascinated me. I have a real affection for things which are incomplete or badly finished, for things awkwardly try to take flight only to fall clumsily to the ground.
Clarice Lispector
#29. There are those who have. And there are those who have not. It's very simple: the girl had not. Hadn't what? Simply this: she had not. If you get my meaning that's fine. If you don't, it's still fine.
Clarice Lispector
#31. Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.
Clarice Lispector
#32. Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage
Clarice Lispector
#33. I ask: will she ever someday know love's farewell? Will she ever someday know the swoonings of love? Will she take in her own way the sweet journey? I know nothing. What can you do with the truth that everyone's a little sad and a little alone.
Clarice Lispector
#34. Suddenly I've become so restless that I'm capable of saying "That is enough" and ending what I'm writing you, which is based mostly on blind words.
Clarice Lispector
#36. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
Clarice Lispector
#37. Are we fruit of the same tree? No - Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation.
Clarice Lispector
#38. Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regards to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?
Clarice Lispector
#39. I was first drawn to you thinking you were going to teach me something more than that. I needed that which I sensed in you and which you have always denied.
Clarice Lispector
#40. Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now.
Clarice Lispector
#41. To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.
Clarice Lispector
#42. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.
Clarice Lispector
#43. At this moment is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing.
Clarice Lispector
#44. I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.
Clarice Lispector
#45. The minute she sensed he had left the house, however, she transformed, concentrated on herself and, as if she had merely been interrupted by him, continued slowly living.
Clarice Lispector
#48. For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.
Clarice Lispector
#49. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.
Clarice Lispector
#50. As long as I have questions and no answers I'll keep on writing. How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen? If before the pre-prehistory there were already the apocalyptic monsters? If this story doesn't exist now, it will.
Clarice Lispector
#51. Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.
Clarice Lispector
#52. Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.
Clarice Lispector
#55. I'm so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.
Clarice Lispector
#56. And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
Clarice Lispector
#58. That power he had to deplete things before getting them, that stark premonition he had of "afterward" ...Before taking the first step toward action, he had already tasted the saturation and sorrow that follow victories...
Clarice Lispector
#59. Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived.
Clarice Lispector
#60. there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.
Clarice Lispector
#61. - How does it feel to have a daughter?
- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.
Clarice Lispector
#62. Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?
Clarice Lispector
#63. What would a person say to himself in the madness of sincerity? But it would be salvation. Thought the terror of sincerity comes from the part of the shadows that connect me to the world and to the creating unconscious of the world. Today is a night with many stars in the sky. It stopped raining.
Clarice Lispector
#65. For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.
Clarice Lispector
#66. I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.
Clarice Lispector
#67. I've always liked putting things in their places. I think it's my only true calling. By ordering things I create and understand at the same time ... Ordering is finding the best form.
Clarice Lispector
#68. I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what's behind thought?
Clarice Lispector
#69. Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.
Clarice Lispector
#70. She knew what desire was - though she didn't know she knew. It was like this: she was starving but not for food, it was a kind of painful taste that rose from the pit of her stomach and made her nipples quiver and her arms empty without an embrace.
Clarice Lispector
#71. No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.
Clarice Lispector
#72. I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
Clarice Lispector
#74. There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.
Clarice Lispector
#75. I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw.
Clarice Lispector
#76. However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love that people receive.
Clarice Lispector
#77. But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I'm subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.
Clarice Lispector
#78. Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what.
Clarice Lispector
#79. Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. My heart has emptied itself of every desire and been reduced to its own final or primary beat.
Clarice Lispector
#80. Should I divulge that she adored soldiers? She was mad about them. Whenever she caught sight of a soldier, she would think, trembling with excitement: is he going to murder me?
Clarice Lispector
#81. The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.
Clarice Lispector
#82. Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.
Clarice Lispector
#83. There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she hated nature sometimes.
Clarice Lispector
#84. And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.
Clarice Lispector
#85. my qualities are so small, the same of those of other men, my flaws, my negative side is beautiful and concave like an abyss. What I am not would leave an enormous hole in the earth.
Clarice Lispector
#86. I am exploiting the written word with the utmost ease. This alarms me, for I am afraid of losing my sense of order and of plunging into an abyss resounding with cries and shrieks: The Hell of human freedom. But I shall continue
Clarice Lispector
#87. Never suffer because you don't have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.
Clarice Lispector
#88. I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me.
Clarice Lispector
#89. It's hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I'm bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I'm still to be born and I can't quite manage it.
Clarice Lispector
#90. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
Clarice Lispector
#91. Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.
Clarice Lispector
#92. But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man's greatest sorrows.
Clarice Lispector
#93. You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.
Clarice Lispector
#94. Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.
Clarice Lispector
#95. A horse is freedom so indominable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated, but with a simple, rebellious toss of the head-shaking its mane like an abundance of free-flowing hair-it shows that its inner nature is always wild, translucent and free.
Clarice Lispector
#96. Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.
Clarice Lispector
#97. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.
Clarice Lispector
#99. What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.
Clarice Lispector
#100. Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me and I don't know how to speak - reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier.
Clarice Lispector
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