xy

@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Variant: I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
Source: The Hour of the Star (1977), p. 11

“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 (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

Source: The Stream of Life

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Delights (1968)

“Perhaps I have not been made for the pure, expansive waters, but for those which are small and readily accesible. And perhaps my craving for another source, which gives me the expression of someone in search of food, perhaps this craving is a whim - and nothing more. Yet surely those rare moments of self-confidence, of blind existence, of happiness as intense and serene as an organ playing - surely those moments prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this longing which consumes my whole being is not merely some whim? Moreover, that whim is the truth!”

Clarice Lispector book Near to the Wild Heart

Near to the Wild Heart (1943), p. 65

“For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting.”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“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 book A Breath of Life

Source: A Breath of Life

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

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

Source: The Stream of Life

“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 book The Passion According to G.H.

Source: The Passion According to G.H.

“She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“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 (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

Source: A Hora Da Estrela

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

Clarice Lispector book The Passion According to G.H.

Source: The Passion According to G.H.

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star (1977), p. 11

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

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Hour of the Star (1977)
Source: A Hora Da Estrela

“Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists — rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Nobel lecture (1978)

“I know as a writer how valuable a tool is the wastebasket. Perhaps God throws away many experiments before He finds the right expression. Perhaps we are the discards — or we could be the part He keeps. This mystery is what keeps us all going, to see what happens in the next chapter.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

"Isaac Singer’s Promised City" by Stefan Kanfer in City Journal (Summer 1997) http://www.city-journal.org/html/7_3_urbanities-isaac.html

“Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

The New York Times (3 December 1978)

“We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

Stories for Children (1984)

“The analysis of character is the highest human entertainment.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish-American author

The New York Times (26 November 1978)