Clarice Lispector Quotes

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.”

“Was that, then, the way we do things? "Not knowing"— was that the way the most profound things happened?… Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker?”

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

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

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

“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!”

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

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

“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.”

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

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

“I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”

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

“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”

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

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

“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?”

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

“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”

“But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I’m subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.”

“I work only with lost and founds.”

“But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”

“Living leaves me atremble.”

“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.”