Clarice Lispector Quotes

Nothing happened if she kept waiting for what was going to happen . ~ Clarice Lispector

I knew that cockroaches could go more than a month without food or water. And they could even survive on wood for food. And even after you step on them they come apart slowly and keep on walking all the while. Even when they freeze, after they thaw out they keep on going. For three hundred and fifty million years, they have reproduced with no change. When the world was practically naked, they walked slowly across it. ~ Clarice Lispector

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need - but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are. ~ Clarice Lispector

She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucelus of⁠ - of ecstasy, let's say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn't know what she was meditating because she didn't know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she'd get lost in the successive and round emptiness inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that's why she made even more mistakes. ~ Clarice Lispector

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

Everything is heavy with dreams when I paint a cave or write to you about one - out of it comes the clatter of dozens of unfettered horses to trample the shadows with dry hooves, and from the friction of the hooves the rejoicing liberates itself in sparks: here I am, the cave and I, in the time that will rot us. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

I was now so much greater that I could no longer see myself. As great as a far-off landscape. I was far off. But perceptible in my furthest mountains and in my remotest rivers: the simultaneous present no longer scared me, and in the furthest extremity of me I could finally smile without even smiling. At last I was stretching beyond my sensibility. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

How do I explain that my greatest fear is precisely in relation to ... to being?" (5) ~ Clarice Lispector

What I have to say is superfluous for anyone who often feels the pangs of hunger ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes. ~ Clarice Lispector

I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well. ~ Clarice Lispector

On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.
The worst moment of her life was on that day at the end of the afternoon: she'd lapse into worried meditation, the emptiness of dry Sunday. She sighed. She missed being little - manioc flour - and thought she'd been happy. Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn't even know it. As for me, I substitute the act of death for a symbol of it. A symbol that can be summed up in a deep kiss but not on a rough wall but mouth-to-mouth in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection ~ Clarice Lispector

… everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off secret, radiating, luminous rays that would smother me if I didn't cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. God help me: I have no one to guide me and it's dark again. ~ Clarice Lispector

She felt the phrase "demand her rights" had lain inside her forever, waiting. ~ Clarice Lispector

For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting. ~ Clarice Lispector

I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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. ~ John D'Agata

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

Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season ~ Clarice Lispector

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

However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love that people receive. ~ Clarice Lispector

I am exploiting the written word with the utmost ease. This alarms me, for I am afraid of losing my sense of order and of plunging into an abyss resounding with cries and shrieks: The Hell of human freedom. But I shall continue ~ Clarice Lispector

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

I shall need to courage to do what I'm about to do: speak. And risk the enormous surprise I shall feel at the poverty of the spoken thing. As soon as it's out of my mouth, I'll have to add: that's not it, that's not it! But I cannot be afraid of being ridiculous, I always preferred less to more also out of fear of the ridiculous: because there's also the shattering of modesty. I'm putting off having to speak to myself. Out of fear? And because I don't have a word to say. I don't have a word to say. So why don't I shut up? But if I do not force out the word muteness will swallow me forever in waves. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy. ~ 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

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

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

Because the best phrase and always still the youngest, was: goodness makes me want to be sick. Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time, seasoned a little, enough to keep it a piece of lukewarm, quiet meat. ~ 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

Something broke in me and left me with a nerve split in two. In the beginning the extremities linked to the cut hurt me so badly that I paled in pain and perplexity. However the split places gradually scarred over. Until coldly, I no longer hurt. I changed, without planning to. I used to look at you from my inside outward and from the inside of you, which because of love, I could guess. After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in: I had transformed myself into a heap of facts and actions whose only root was in the domain of logic. At first I couldn't associate me with myself. Where am I? I wondered. And the one who answered was a stranger who told me coldly and categorically: you are yourself. ~ 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

I always give names to things ~ Clarice Lispector

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

What does it feel like to have a girl?" said the man, chewing. Her father wiped his mouth with his napkin, tilted his head to one side and said smiling: "Sometimes it feels like I have a warm egg in my hand. Sometimes, nothing: total memory loss…Occasionally it feels like I have a girl of my own, really mine. ~ Clarice Lispector

It's hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I'm bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I'm still to be born and I can't quite manage it. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

I find the greatest serenity in hallucination. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

The great question she raised involved me: is it worth while? I do not know, my ever greater calm replied, but it is so. There, before my silence, she surrendered to the process, & if she was asking me the great question, it had to go unanswered. She had to giver herself-for nothing. It had to be. And for nothing. She held back, unwilling to surrender. But I waited. I knew that we are that thing that must happen. I could be useful to her silence. And, dazed by misunderstanding, I could hear a heart beating inside me that was not mine. Before my fascinated eyes, like some emanation, she was being transformed into a child. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human? ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ 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

A horse is freedom so indominable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated, but with a simple, rebellious toss of the head-shaking its mane like an abundance of free-flowing hair-it shows that its inner nature is always wild, translucent and free. ~ Clarice Lispector

But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man's greatest sorrows. ~ Clarice Lispector

I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation. ~ Clarice Lispector

What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I'm doing it right now: I'm following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that's still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping. ~ Clarice Lispector

Listen up, pal, the moon is way up in the sky. Aren't you scared? The helplessness that comes from nature. That moonlight, think about it, that moonlight, paler than a corpse's face, so silent and far away, that moonlight witnessed the cries of the first monsters to walk the earth, surveyed the peaceful waters after the deluges and the floods, illuminated centuries of nights and went out at dawns throughout centuries . . . Think about it, my friend, that moonlight will be the same tranquil ghost when the last traces of your great-grandsons' grandsons no longer exist. Prostrate yourself before it. You've shown up for an instant and it is forever. Don't you suffer, pal? I . . . I myself can't stand it. It hits me right here, in the center of my heart, having to die one day and, thousands of centuries later, undistinguished in humus, eyeless for all eternity, I, I!, for all eternity . . . and the indifferent, triumphant moon, its pale hands outstretched over new men, new things, different beings. And I Dead! Think about it, my friend. It's shining over the cemetery right now. The cemetery, where all lie sleeping who once were and never more shall be. There, where the slightest whisper makes the living shudder in terror and where the tranquility of the stars muffles our cries and brings terror to our eyes. There, where there are neither tears nor thoughts to express the profound misery of coming to an end. ~ Clarice Lispector

If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy. ~ Clarice Lispector

How living hurt. Living was an open wound. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

Una furtiva lacrima had been the only really beautiful thing in her life. Wiping away her own tears she tried to sing what she heard. But her voice was as crude and out of tune as she was. When she heard it she started to cry. It was the first time she'd ever cried, she didn't know she had so much water in her eyes. She cried, blew her nose no longer knowing what she was crying about. She wasn't crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she'd accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling, there were more delicate existences and even a certain luxury of soul. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

Freedom isn't enough. What I desire doesn't have a name yet. ~ Clarice Lispector

She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse. ~ Clarice Lispector

But I don't know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it's not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today. ~ Clarice Lispector

When I surprise myself in the depths of the mirror I get a fright. I can hardly believe that I have limits, that I am cut out and defined. I feel scattered in the air, thinking inside other beings, living in things beyond myself. 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 at the pale mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent. ~ Clarice Lispector

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms. ~ Clarice Lispector

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. ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ Clarice Lispector

God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted. ~ Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks. ~ Clarice Lispector