Clarice Lispector citations

“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.”

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

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”