Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”

— Clarice Lispector

2. “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

4. “Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?”

— Clarice Lispector

5. “I write to save someone’s life, probably my own.”

— Clarice Lispector

6. “To think is an act. To feel is a fact.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

8. “Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.”

— Clarice Lispector

9. “I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

12. “And now – now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don’t forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”

— Clarice Lispector

13. “Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace – call it passion.”

— Clarice Lispector

14. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

17. “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

18. “In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”

— Clarice Lispector

19. “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

21. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

23. “And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”

— Clarice Lispector

24. “Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”

— Clarice Lispector

25. “Escribo como si fuera a salvar la vida de alguien. Probablemente mi propia vida.”

— Clarice Lispector

26. “A horse is freedom so indominable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated, but with a simple, rebellious toss of the head-shaking its mane like an abundance of free-flowing hair-it shows that its inner nature is always wild, translucent and free.”

— Clarice Lispector

27. “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

28. “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

29. “And I want to be held down. I don’t know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

32. “Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I’ve never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I’ve became intolerable to myself. I live in the dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me.”

— Clarice Lispector

33. “The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that’s a bit much.”

— Clarice Lispector

34. “Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.”

— Clarice Lispector

35. “Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.”

— Clarice Lispector

36. “I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

39. “Holding someone’s hand was always my idea of joy.”

— Clarice Lispector

40. “And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn’t have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.”

— Clarice Lispector

41. “I work only with lost and founds.”

— Clarice Lispector

42. “Pensar es un acto. Sentir es un hecho. Los dos juntos son yo que escribo lo que estoy escribiendo. Dios es el mundo. La verdad es siempre un contacto interior e inexplicable.”

— Clarice Lispector

43. “Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful – for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.”

— Clarice Lispector

44. “For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If “truth” were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.”

— Clarice Lispector

45. “I am only true when I’m alone.”

— Clarice Lispector

46. “I, who called love my hope for love.”

— Clarice Lispector

47. “Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

49. “I think we have to do forbidden things, otherwise we suffocate. But without feeling guilty and instead as an announcement that we are free.”

— Clarice Lispector

50. “And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a person alone, all alone. Oh, needing doesn’t isolate a person, things need things: it’s enough to see a chick walking to see that its destiny will be what lack will make of it, its destiny is to join, like drops of mercury cling to other drops of mercury, even though, like all drops of mercury, it has a complete and rounded existence in itself.”

— Clarice Lispector