Lispector Clarice Quotes & Sayings

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

You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

Inside her it was as if death didn't exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal. — Clarice Lispector

I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten. — Clarice Lispector

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

Saying meaningless words is my great freedom. — Clarice Lispector

I always give names to things — 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

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

Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now. — Clarice Lispector

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

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

As long as I have questions and no answers I'll keep on writing. How do you start at the beginning, if things happen before they happen? If before the pre-prehistory there were already the apocalyptic monsters? If this story doesn't exist now, it will. — Clarice Lispector

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

Everything struck her at times as too precious, impossible to touch. And, at times, what people used as air to breathe, was weight and death for her. — Clarice Lispector

(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... — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror. — Clarice Lispector

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? — Clarice Lispector

And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand. — Clarice Lispector

She knew what desire was - though she didn't know she knew. It was like this: she was starving but not for food, it was a kind of painful taste that rose from the pit of her stomach and made her nipples quiver and her arms empty without an embrace. — 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

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

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. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument. — 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

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. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

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'. — 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

Mama, before she got married, according to Aunt Emilia, was a firecracker, a tempestuous redhead, with thoughts of her own about liberty and equality for women. But then along came Papa, very serious and tall, with thoughts of his own too, about... liberty and equality for women. The trouble was in the coinciding subject matter. There was a collision. And nowadays Mama sews and embroiders and sings at the piano and makes little cakes on Saturdays, all like clockwork and cheerfully, She has ideas of her own, still, but they all come down to one: a wife should always go along with her husband, as the accessory goes along with the principal (my analogy, the result of Law School classes). — Clarice Lispector

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

What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn't knowing? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth exist anyway? THe truth that doesn't transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person? — 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

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

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. — 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

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

I work only with lost and founds. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers. — Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

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

- I'm searching, I'm searching. I'm trying to understand. Trying to give what I've lived to somebody else and I don't know to whom, but I don't want to keep what I lived. I don't know what to do with what I lived, I'm afraid of that profound disorder. I don't trust what happened to me. Did something happen to me that I, because I didn't know how to live it, lived as something else? That's what I'd like to call disorganization, and I'd have the confidence to venture on, because I would know where to return afterward: to the previous organization. I'd rather call it disorganization because I don't want to confirm myself in what I lived - in the confirmation of me I would lose the world as I had it, and I know I don't have the fortitude for another. — Clarice Lispector

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

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

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. — 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

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. — 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

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

I was first drawn to you thinking you were going to teach me something more than that. I needed that which I sensed in you and which you have always denied. — Clarice Lispector

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

The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself. — Clarice Lispector

I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

I, who called love my hope for love. — 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

I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw. — Clarice Lispector

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. — 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

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. — 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

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her? — Clarice Lispector

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

Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it. — Clarice Lispector

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

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

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand. — Clarice Lispector

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer? — Clarice Lispector

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men. — Clarice Lispector

She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed — 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

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

Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. — 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

If you have kissed the wall, you can accept anything. — Clarice Lispector

Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession. — Clarice Lispector

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

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought ... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. — Clarice Lispector

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. — Clarice Lispector

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

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