“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 StarSource: The Hour of the Star (1977), p. 11
“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 LifeSource: 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 LifeSource: 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
“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
“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)
“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 StarThe Hour of the Star (1977)