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Clarice Lispector Quotes

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart , written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties , the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. , and what is arguably her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since that publication, her works have been the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, the first Brazilian to enter that prestigious series. Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories , describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka. Wikipedia  

✵ 10. December 1920 – 9. December 1977  •  Other names クラリッセ・リスペクトール, کلاریس لیسپکتور
Clarice Lispector photo

Works

The Hour of the Star
The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart
Near to the Wild Heart
Clarice Lispector
A Breath of Life
A Breath of Life
Clarice Lispector
The Hour of the Star
The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector
Near to the Wild Heart
Near to the Wild Heart
Clarice Lispector
A Breath of Life
A Breath of Life
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector: 34 quotes47 likes

Famous Clarice Lispector Quotes

“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

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

Clarice Lispector

Source: The Stream of Life

“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.

“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

“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.

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

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector Quotes about life

“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 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 book A Breath of Life

Source: A Breath of Life

“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

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 169

“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.”

Clarice Lispector

An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Delights (1968)

“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?”

Clarice Lispector

The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 159

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

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star (1977)

Clarice Lispector Quotes

“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

Source: A Hora Da Estrela

“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

“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

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

Clarice Lispector

An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Delights (1968)

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“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

Source: The Stream of Life

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

Clarice Lispector book The Passion According to G.H.

Source: The Passion According to G.H. (1964), p. 5

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

Clarice Lispector book A Breath of Life

Source: A Breath of Life

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

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“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 book Near to the Wild Heart

Source: Near to the Wild Heart

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

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“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.”

Clarice Lispector

Source: The Stream of Life

“I work only with lost and founds.”

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector book The Hour of the Star

Source: The Hour of the Star

“Living leaves me atremble.”

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 book Near to the Wild Heart

Near to the Wild Heart (1943), p. 43

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