Clarice Lispector Quotes

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

~ Clarice Lispector

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

~ Clarice Lispector

but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

~ Clarice Lispector

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

~ Clarice Lispector

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

~ Clarice Lispector

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

Long live the dead because we live in them.

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called freedom is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.

~ Clarice Lispector

Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author's need to thinking - he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the everything. But everything is a quanitity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers adn where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling.

~ Clarice Lispector

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

~ Clarice Lispector

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?

~ Clarice Lispector

When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open pale at the mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.

~ Clarice Lispector

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

~ Clarice Lispector

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

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

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

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

~ Clarice Lispector

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

~ Clarice Lispector

It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.

~ Clarice Lispector

She felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.

~ Clarice Lispector

But she didn’t want to rest! – Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

~ Clarice Lispector

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

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam | She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed

~ Clarice Lispector

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

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?

~ Clarice Lispector

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

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

~ Clarice Lispector

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.

~ Clarice Lispector