Top 100 Clarice Quotes
#2. I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.
Thomas Harris
#3. Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.
Italo Calvino
#4. I'm going to cut you loose. With all due respect, Doctor, if you fuck with me I'll shoot you dead, here and now. Do you understand that?"- Clarice
"Perfectly."- Hannibal Lecter
"Do right and you'll live through this." -Clarice
Thomas Harris
#5. What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.
Thomas Harris
#6. Well," Clarice said, once the pirates were safely out of earshot. "Nobody shot us." "Yet," Dominick answered.
Mercedes Lackey
#7. She had gone to the state fair in Columbus once with her sister Clarice and they had gotten lost in the House of Mirrors and Clarice's purse had been stolen by a man who had pretended to be a reflection until the very last moment.
David Foster Wallace
#8. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.
Thomas Harris
#9. 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
#10. The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.
Thomas Harris
#11. Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
Italo Calvino
#12. Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.
Thomas Harris
#13. I'd thought Clarice's smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever.
Joshilyn Jackson
#14. When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice.
Hannibal Lecter
Thomas Harris
#15. Haven't you ever had people coming over and no time to shop? You have to make do with what's in the fridge, Clarice. May I call you Clarice?
Thomas Harris
#16. Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
Thomas Harris
#17. But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps
deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.
Thomas Harris
#18. Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.
Thomas Harris
#19. That there had to be a place in the world for Mischa, a prime place vacated for her, and I came to think, Clarice, that the best place in the world was yours.
Thomas Harris
#20. I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it.
Thomas Harris
#21. She's a monster." Ms. Robertson
Clarice, small laugh: "But she's out monster.
Kiersten White
#22. He held out the bottle. Clarice's hand was steady as she took it from him. It is poison, she thought distantly. It will kill her. She tried to be horrified at the thought, but she couldn't manage it.
Mercedes Lackey
#24. If somthing is not right or real, dont loss your self. - Clarice Bean Dont look Now
Lauren Child
#25. Clarice has a curious chemical reaction to boredom and the result can be similar to dynamite in the hands of a lunatic ...
Anne Morice
#26. Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.
Benjamin Moser
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.
Clarice Lispector
#30. Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?
Clarice Lispector
#31. Inside her it was as if death didn't exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.
Clarice Lispector
#34. 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
#35. I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South.
Clarice Taylor
#37. I don't know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.
Clarice Lispector
#38. 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
#39. Truth is always an inexplicable inner contact. Truth is unrecognizable. So it doesn't exist? No, For men it doesn't exist.
Clarice Lispector
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.
Clarice Lispector
#44. 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
#45. If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy.
Clarice Lispector
#49. Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.
Clarice Lispector
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not
Clarice Lispector
#56. She knows that it's not my fault if I don't know how many Zs there are in LOSER.
Lauren Child
#57. It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.
Clarice Lispector
#58. God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted.
Clarice Lispector
#59. 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
#60. but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.
Clarice Lispector
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. My family thought it was insanity for me to go into the theater rather than to get an education.
Clarice Taylor
#65. As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.
Clarice Lispector
#66. When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.
Clarice Lispector
#67. It was obvious that their sorrows were conjoined.
Mervyn Peake
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.
Clarice Lispector
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#77. 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
#78. Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage
Clarice Lispector
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. 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
#84. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
Clarice Lispector
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed
Clarice Lispector
#88. What I have to say is superfluous for anyone who often feels the pangs of hunger
Clarice Lispector
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.
Clarice Lispector
#93. Passed (it strikes me that this God was extremely merciful to her: He gave her what He took away).
Clarice Lispector
#94. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.
Clarice Lispector
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#99. 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
#100. The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.
Clarice Lispector
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
