Clarice Lispector Quotes

The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I w...

Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the stronger side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks s...

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

But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this w...

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are...

When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It ...

I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is ...

Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form....

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily...

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

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

But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a ...

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I reme...

But she didn’t want to rest! – Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a ...

I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll ...

But if I hope to understand in order to accept things - the act of surrender will never happen. I mu...

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

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

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God...

It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is ...

there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. A...

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; realit...

Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later...

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

I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could ...

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not w...

What would a person say to himself in the madness of sincerity? But it would be salvation. Thought t...

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I ...

Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? ...

There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall a...

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

Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was ...

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

One day we shall domesticate him into a human being & then I shall be able to sketch him. For this i...

A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has k...

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because ...

Long live the dead because we live in them.

And one of the things I learned is that one should live in spite of. Although, one should eat. Altho...

And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material,...

There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in...

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

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

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

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means ...

- How does it feel to have a daughter?- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.

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

Inside her it was as if death didn’t exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible...

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach...

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fu...

It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through ...

Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May the...

When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I...

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing mor...

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

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim...

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

Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; an...

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it...

The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowl...

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matt...

Suddenly I've become so restless that I'm capable of saying "That is enough" and ending what I'm wri...

Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language....

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself be...