Lispector Quotes

#1. I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?
#Quote by Clarice Lispector

#2. To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it's with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I'm alive. But I feel I've not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I'm full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all this I gained when I stopped loving you. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#3. But I also know of yet another life. I know and want it and devour it ferociously. It's a life of magical violence. It's mysterious and bewitching. In it snakes entwine while the stars tremble. Drops of water drip in the phosphorescent darkness of the cave. In that dark the flowers intertwine in a humid fairy garden. And I am the sorceress of that silent bacchanal. I feel defeated by my own corruptibility. And I see that I am intrinsically bad. It's only out of pure kindness that I am good. Defeated by myself. Who lead me along the paths of the salamander, the spirit who rules the fire and lives within it. And I give myself as an offering to the dead. I weave spells on the solstice, spectre of an exorcised dragon. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#4. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#5. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#6. Every day it will be the same thing: at dusk I begin to feel melancholy and pensive. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#7. Never, until then, had life happened to me by day. Never in sunlight. Only in my nights did the world slowly revolve. Only that, whatever happened in the dark of night itself, would also happen at the same time in my own entrails, and my dark wasn't differentiated from the dark outside, and in the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was still a surface: the secret life of the night soon reduced in my mouth to the taste of a nightmare that disappears. but now life was happening by day. undeniable and to be seen. unless I averted my eyes.

and I could still avert my eyes. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#8. My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.
It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#9. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#10. To write I begin by stripping myself of words. I prefer the poor words left over. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#11. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#12. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#13. Ah, hand holding mine, if I hadn't needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life! #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#14. I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I'll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as life said the following: and there simply was no following. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#15. Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#16. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#17. The future, at least, had the advantage of not being the present, and the worse can always take a turn for the better... For, strange though it may seem, she had faith. Composed of fine organic matter, she existed. Pure and simple. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#18. Truth is always an inexplicable inner contact. Truth is unrecognizable. So it doesn't exist? No, For men it doesn't exist. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#19. What Angela writes can be read aloud: her words are voluptuous and give physical pleasure. I am geometric, Angela is a spiral, all finesse. She is intuitive, I am logical. She is not afraid to err in the use of words. And I do not err. I am well aware that she is the succulent grape and I am the raisin. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#20. Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#21. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#22. If the reader possesses any wealth and a comfortable life, he'll step out of himself to see how the other sometimes lives. If he's poor, he won't be reading me because reading me is superfluous for anyone who has a slight permanent hunger. Here I'm playing the role of a safety valve for you and from the massacring life of the average middle class. I'm well aware that it's frightening to step out of oneself, but everything new is frightening. Though the anonymous girl in this story is so ancient that she could be a biblical figure. She was subterranean and had never flowered: I'm lying: she was grass. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#23. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#24. Arriving back home, I didn't start to read it. I pretended I didn't have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn't know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#25. Life really just barely escapes me though the certainty comes to me that life is other and has a hidden style #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#26. 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? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#27. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#28. To think is an act. To feel is a fact. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#29. In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#30. I know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#31. Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#32. Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#33. Freedom isn't enough. What I desire doesn't have a name yet. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#34. Living leaves me atremble. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#35. And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#36. Where does music go when it's not playing? - she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#37. - Good manners are the best inheritance. - Well I think the best inheritance is lots of money. But one day I'll be very rich - said he who had a demonic grandeur: his strength was bursting. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#38. Death is an encounter with oneself. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#39. And so I realise that I want for myself the vibrant substratum of the word repeated in a Gregorian chant. I'm aware that everything I know I cannot say, I know only by paining or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I have to use words for you, they must create an almost exclusively bodily meaning. I'm battling with the ultimate vibration. To tell you my substratum I make a sentence of words composed only of the now-instants. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#40. The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#41. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#42. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#43. To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#44. My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#45. Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#46. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#47. To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait , has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read 'absent-minded'. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#48. One day we shall domesticate him into a human being & then I shall be able to sketch him. For this is what we have done with ourselves & with God. The little boy will assist his own domestication; he is diligent & cooperative. He cooperates without knowing that the assistance we expect of him is for his own self-sacrifice. Recently, he has had much practice. And so he will go on progressing until little by little
because of essential goodness with which we achieve our salvation
he will pass from actual time to daily time, from meditation to expression, from existence to life. Making the great sacrifice of not being mad. I am not mad out of solidarity with thousands of people who, in order to construct the possible, have also sacrificed the truth which would constitute madness. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#49. Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#50. 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... #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#51. I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#52. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#53. Things are very delicate. People tread upon them with too many human feet, with too many sentiments. Only the delicacy of innocence or only the delicacy of the initiate senses its almost nonexistent taste. Before, I needed seasoning for everything, and in that way I skipped over the thing and tasted the taste of the seasoning. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#54. Macabéa had a passion for horror films and musicals. She especially liked films where the women were hanged or shot through the heart with a bullet. It never dawned on her that she herself was a suicide case even though she had never contemplated killing herself. Her life was duller than plain bread and butter. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#55. At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#56. 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? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#57. The doctor simply refused to take pity. And added: when you don't know what to eat make a nice Italian spaghetti. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#58. When asked if he had a special feeling for books, critic-turned-filmmaker Francois Truffaut answered, "No. I love them and films equally, but how I love them!" As an example, Truffaut gave the example that his feeling of love for "Citizen Kane" (USA, 1941) "is expressed in that scene in 'The 400 Blows' where Antoine lights a candle before the picture of Balzac.' My book lights candles for m any of the great authors of this world: Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Angela Carter (UK), Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (India), Janet Frame (New Zealand), Yu Hua (China), Stieg Larsson (Sweden), Clarice Lispector (Brazil), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Naguib Mifouz (Egypt), Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), and Alice Walker (USA) - to name but a few. Furthermore, graphic novels, manga, musicals, television, webisodes and even amusement park rides like 'Pirates of the Caribbean' can inspire work in adaptation. Let's be open to learning from them all. ("Great Adaptations: Screenwriting and Global Storytelling," 2) #Quote by Alexis Krasilovsky

#59. I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men. I write because I'm desperate and I'm tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day. But I am prepared to slip out discreetly through the back exit. I've experienced almost everything, including passion and its despair. And now I'd only like to have what I would have been and never was. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#60. I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#61. When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#62. 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 #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#63. 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? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#64. she is a harmless virgin whom nobody needs. It strikes me that I don't need her either and that what I am writing could be written by another. Another writer, of course, but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#65. I am the cockroach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of brightest light on the wall plaster - I am every Hellish piece of myself - life is so pervasive in me that if they divide me in pieces like a lizard, the pieces will keep on shaking and writhing. I am the silence etched on a wall, and the most ancient butterfly flutters in and looks at me: just the same as always. From birth to death is what I call human in myself, and I shall never actually die. But this is not eternity, it is condemnation.
How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of the cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#66. I want the shining gravel in a dark brook. I want the sparkle of the stone beneath the rays of sun, I want death that frees me. I could manage to have pleasure if I abstained from thinking. Then I'd feel the ebb and flow of air in my lungs. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#67. - How does it feel to have a daughter?
- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#68. Anyhow, I get distracted a lot," she repeated.

She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry. She couldn't soothe herself by saying: this is just a pause, life will come afterwards like a wave of blood, washing over me, moistening my parched wood. She couldn't fool herself because she knew she was also living and that those moments were the peak of something difficult, of a painful experience for which she should be thankful: almost as if she were feeling time outside herself, in a detached manner. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#69. At first she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to school in the middle of the woods, of cats drinking milk from golden saucers. And her dreams became increasingly dense and acquired colours that were difficult to dilute into words. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#70. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#71. There are truths I haven't even told God. And not even myself. I am a secret under the lock of seven keys. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#72. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#73. Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#74. A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has killed compulsively, it is because he was extremely frightened. Above all, a justice which might examine itself, & recognize that all of us, a living quagmire, founded in darkness, & for this reason not a man's evil should be cosigned to another man's evil: so that the latter may not shoot to kill without restraint or censure. A justice which will not forget that we are all dangerous, & that at the hour when the executant of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or seeking to eliminate a criminal; he is committing his own crime, which he has been harboring for a considerable time. At the hour of killing a criminal- at that very moment, an innocent man is being put to death. No, no, I am not asking for the sublime, nor for the things which gradually become the words which help me to sleep peacefully. Those of us who take refuge in the abstract are a mixture of forgiveness & vague charity. What I want is something much harsher & much more difficult: I want the terrestrial. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#75. Putting my hand in someone else's has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don't have courage, I dream. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#76. They gave me a name and alienated me from myself. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#77. In the chapter on the force of gravity, in elementary school, she'd invented a man with a funny disease. The force of gravity didn't work on him...So he'd fall off the earth, and keep falling evermore, because she didn't know how to give him a destiny. Where was he falling? Later she figured it out: he kept falling, falling and got used to it, eventually learning how to eat falling, sleep falling, live falling, until he died. And would he keep falling? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#78. I, who called love my hope for love. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#79. The word is my fourth dimension. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#80. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#81. First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#82. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#83. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#84. I feel happier with animals than with people. When I watch my horse cantering freely across the fields - I am tempted to put my head against his soft, vigorous neck and narrate the story of my life. When I stroke my dog on the head - I know that he doesn't expect me to make sense or explain myself. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#85. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#86. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#87. I work only with lost and founds. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#88. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#89. I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#90. If you have kissed the wall, you can accept anything. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#91. Meanwhile the clouds are white & the sky is all blue. Why so much God? Why not a little for men. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#92. Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#93. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#94. I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#95. With your teacher, she said, playing with intimacy, and she was white and smooth. Not miserable and not knowing anything, not abandoned, not dirty-kneed like Joana, like Joana! Joana got up and she knew that her skirt was short, that her blouse was clinging to her minuscule, hesitant bust. Flee, run to the beach, lie face-down in the sand, hide her face, listen to the sound of the sea. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#96. The greatness of every human being. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#97. Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#98. I want shade, I want shade and anonymity.
from "The Departure #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#99. That not-knowing might seem awful but it's not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you're born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she'd surely die one day as if she'd learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it's everyone's moment of glory and it's when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#100. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#101. I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#102. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#103. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#104. But, since we are little and therefore need but little, why is little not enough for us? Because we sense pleasure. Like blind men who feel their way along, we have presentiments of the intense pleasure of living.
And if we have presentiments, it is also because we feel that we are being alarmingly used by God, we feel alarmingly that we are being used with an intense and uninterrupted pleasure - moreover, up to now our salvation has been one of being at least so used, we are not useless, we have been made intense use of by God; body and soul and life are for that: for someone's interchange and ecstasy. Disquieted, we feel that we are being used every minute - but that awakens in us the disquieting desire to use as well. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#105. I feel as though I've already achieved what I wanted and I still don't know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called 'experience'? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#106. I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#107. She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#108. If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#109. How living hurt. Living was an open wound. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#110. The docks went to the heart of her life. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#111. Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#112. Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I've never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I've became intolerable to myself. I live in the dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#113. And my fear, too, was different now: not the fear of someone who is still about to go in but the so much greater fear of someone who has gone in. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#114. She was sitting there in her little housedress. He knew she'd done what she could to avoid becoming luminous and unattainable. Timidly and with respect, he was looking at her. He'd grown older, weary, curious. But he didn't have a single word to say. From the open doorway he saw his wife on the sofa without leaning back, once again alert and tranquil, as if on a train. That had already departed. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#115. And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#116. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#117. Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#118. I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#119. She kept going: why put it off? Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. And her question was solid, demanding a serious answer. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#120. You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#121. Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#122. But I'm afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I'm afraid to start to "make" a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one? as a child thinks about the nothing. And run the risk of being crushed by chance. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#123. There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#124. The person of whom I am about to speak is so simple-minded that she often smiles at other people on the street. No one acknowledges her smile for they don't even notice her.
Coming back to myself: what I am about to write cannot be assimilated by minds that expect much and crave sophistication. For what I am about to express will be quite stark. Although it may have as its background - even now - the tormented shadows that haunt my dreams as I sleep tormented at night. Do not, therefore, expect stars in what follows for nothing will scintillate. This is opaque material and by its very nature it is despised by everyone. This story has no melody that could be rightly termed cantabile. Its rhythm is frequently discordant. It also contains facts. I have always been enthusiastic about facts without literature - facts are hard stones and I am much more interested in action than in meditation. There is no way of escaping facts. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#125. Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#126. I remembered you, when I kissed your man face, slowly, slowly kissed it, and when the time came to kiss your eyes - I remembered that then I had tasted the salt in my mouth, and that the salt of tears in your eyes was my love for you. But, what bound me most of all in a fright of love, had been, in the depth of the depths of the salt, your saltless and innocent and childish substance: with my kiss your deepest insipid life was given to me, and kissing your face was the saltless and busy patient work of love, it was woman weaving a man, just as you had woven me, neutral crafting of life. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#127. No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#128. Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can't walk around naked, either in body or in spirit. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#129. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#130. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#131. I first came across her [Bae Suah] when I read some elderly male critic castigating her for 'doing violence to the Korean language', which of course was catnip to me, especially as I'd recently discovered Lispector doing pretty much the same to Portuguese. #Quote by Deborah Smith

#132. Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#133. Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#134. Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#135. I'm blinder than before. I did see, I really did. I was terrified by the raw truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that for me to admit that I am as alive as it is - and my most hideous discovery is that I am as alive as it is - I shall have to raise my consciousness of life outside to so high a point that it would amount to a crime against my personal life. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#136. As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#137. She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#138. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#139. I don't know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#140. The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality. All the chicken's fright comes because they're always interrupting her reverie. The chicken is a sound sleep ... The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call chicken. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#141. Facts and particulars annoy me. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#142. I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air - I write because I so deeply want to speak. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#143. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#144. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#145. The world rolls and somewhere out there are things I don't know. Let us sleep on God and mystery, a quiet, fragile ship floating on the sea, behold sleep. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#146. Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#147. 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 #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#148. Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality - the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#149. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#150. I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#151. There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#152. I don't miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening... #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#153. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#154. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#155. 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. #Quote by Benjamin Moser

#156. Yes, she felt a perfect animal inside her. The thought of one day setting this animal loose disgusted her. Perhaps for fear of lack of aesthetic. Or dreading a revelation… No, no, she repeated, you mustn't be afraid to create. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#157. She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#158. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#159. My maturing of a theme would already be a cantabile aria - so let somebody else make another song - the song of the maturing of my quartet. This is before the maturing. The melody would be the fact. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#160. 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? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#161. I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#162. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#163. I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it's because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#164. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#165. Now I know: I'm alone. I and my freedom that I don't know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn't lost doesn't know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#166. Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#167. The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#168. The sea, the sea's swell, silent and breathless. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#169. she had stared through the window at a little old lady in the sun, grubby, light and quick – a branch quivering in the breeze. A dry branch where there was so much femininity, Joana had thought, that the poor dear could have a child if life hadn't dried up in her body #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#170. She saw dark, triumphant crimson in herself. What was making her glow so much? Boredom… Yes, in spite of everything there was fire under it, there was fire even when it represented death. Maybe this was the joy of living. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#171. Those I love go in the direction of what they call the last hour - what Clarice Lispector calls, "the hour of the star," "the hour of relinquishing all the lies that have helped us live.
Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of our two needs: our need for love and cowardice. #Quote by Helene Cixous

#172. But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#173. (I dedicate it) - to all those who reached the most alarmingly unsuspected regions within me, all those prophets of the present and who have foretold me to myself until in that instant I exploded into: I. This I that is all of you since I can't stand being just me, I need others in order to get by, fool that I am... #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#174. I'm stalling. I know that everything I say is just to put it off-to put off the moment when I'll have to start talking, knowing that there is nothing more for me to say. I'm putting off my silence. Have I been putting off silence for my whole life? but now, in my disparagement of the word, perhaps I'll finally be able to start talking. (14) #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#175. As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it's not. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#176. To know when to quit. Whether to give up
this is often the question facing the gambler. No one is taught the art of walking away. And the anguish of deciding if I should keep playing is hardly unusual. Will I be able to quit honorably? or am I the type who waits stubbornly for something to happen? something like, for instance, the end of the world? or whatever it might be, maybe my own sudden death, in which case my decision to give up would be beside the point. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#177. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#178. I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#179. I'm not a synonym - I'm a proper noun. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#180. I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#181. Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#182. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#183. I am only true when I'm alone. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#184. Instead of obtaining myself by fleeing, I find myself forsaken, alone, tossed into a dimensionless cubicle, where light and shadow are quiet ghosts. In my interior I find the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. If I were to scream - already without lucidity I imagine - my voice would receive the same, indifferent echo of the walls of the earth #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#185. I forgot to mention that sometimes this typist is nauseated by the thought of food. This dates from her childhood when she discovered that she had eaten a fried cat. The thought revolted her for ever more. She lost her appetite and felt the great hunger thereafter. She was convinced that she had committed a crime; that she had eaten a fried angel, its wings snapping between her teeth. She believed in angels, and because she believed in them, they existed. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#186. But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#187. Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#188. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#189. Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the stronger side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arms of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#190. I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open. #Quote by John D'Agata

#191. I see that the wardrobe looks penetrable because it has a door. But when I open it, I see that penetration has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door. Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature: that of the inviolability of things. Relation to people: we look at ourselves in the mirror on the inside of the door, we always look at ourselves in an inconvenient light because the wardrobe is never in the right place: awkward, it stands wherever it fits, always huge, hunchbacked, shy and clumsy, unaware how to be more discreet, for it has too much presence. A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive, sad, kind. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#192. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#193. She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#194. 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. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#195. I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out - I can no longer see things clearly - my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#196. But I've never known what to do with people and the things I like, sometimes they weigh me down, ever since I was a girl. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#197. And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was "becoming". Wasn't it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times? #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#198. Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve. #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#199. Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage #Quote by Clarice Lispector

#200. As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots of a rare tree, that's how I write to you, and those roots as if they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires for fulfillment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and needs the approval of God: that is creation. #Quote by Clarice Lispector