Top 100 Clarice Lispector Quotes
#1. Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief.
Benjamin Moser
#2. 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
#3. I don't want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.
Clarice Lispector
#4. It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.
Clarice Lispector
#5. I write very simple and very naked. That's why it wounds. I'm a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.
Clarice Lispector
#7. The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.
Clarice Lispector
#8. And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.
Clarice Lispector
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.
Clarice Lispector
#14. Passed (it strikes me that this God was extremely merciful to her: He gave her what He took away).
Clarice Lispector
#15. To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.
Clarice Lispector
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I want to seize my is. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air. And my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by an hallelujah.
Clarice Lispector
#19. What I have to say is superfluous for anyone who often feels the pangs of hunger
Clarice Lispector
#20. She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed
Clarice Lispector
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
Clarice Lispector
#24. Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.
Clarice Lispector
#26. Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.
Clarice Lispector
#28. 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
#29. Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?
Clarice Lispector
#30. - How does it feel to have a daughter?
- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.
Clarice Lispector
#31. How do I explain that my greatest fear is precisely in relation to ... to being?" (5)
Clarice Lispector
#32. 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
#34. She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.
Clarice Lispector
#35. I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.
Clarice Lispector
#36. Why don't clouds fall, since everything else does? Because gravity is less than the strength of the air that keeps them up there. Clever, right? Yes, but one day they fall as rain. That is my revenge.
Clarice Lispector
#37. Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived.
Clarice Lispector
#38. But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.
Clarice Lispector
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.
Clarice Lispector
#42. Only then did she see that her life was miserable. She felt like crying when she saw her other side, she who, as I said, had always thought she was happy.
Clarice Lispector
#43. 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
#46. Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?
Clarice Lispector
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.
Clarice Lispector
#51. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
Clarice Lispector
#52. Truth is always an inexplicable inner contact. Truth is unrecognizable. So it doesn't exist? No, For men it doesn't exist.
Clarice Lispector
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.
Clarice Lispector
#59. If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy.
Clarice Lispector
#60. An egg is a thing that must be careful. That's why the chicken is the egg's disguise. The chicken exists so that the egg can traverse the ages. That's what a mother is for.
Clarice Lispector
#62. The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
Clarice Lispector
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I don't know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.
Clarice Lispector
#69. 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
#72. Inside her it was as if death didn't exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.
Clarice Lispector
#73. Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?
Clarice Lispector
#74. The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.
Clarice Lispector
#75. She kept going: why put it off? Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. And her question was solid, demanding a serious answer.
Clarice Lispector
#76. 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
#77. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
Clarice Lispector
#78. Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage
Clarice Lispector
#79. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.
Clarice Lispector
#86. Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language. I give myself the name Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.
Clarice Lispector
#87. 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
#88. Ah, hand holding mine, if I hadn't needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life!
Clarice Lispector
#89. 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
#90. As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.
Clarice Lispector
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.
Clarice Lispector
#95. 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
#96. God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted.
Clarice Lispector
#97. It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.
Clarice Lispector
#98. I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not
Clarice Lispector
#99. I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.
Clarice Lispector
#100. How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?
Clarice Lispector
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