Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 7

51. “I’ is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms.”

— Clarice Lispector

52. “Facts are words spoken by the world.”

— Clarice Lispector

53. “Who hasn’t asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”

— Clarice Lispector

54. “She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams.”

— Clarice Lispector

55. “The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”

— Clarice Lispector

56. “I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”

— Clarice Lispector

57. “Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

— Clarice Lispector

58. “They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

59. “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

60. “Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.”

— Clarice Lispector

61. “She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time.”

— Clarice Lispector

62. “I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”

— Clarice Lispector

63. “Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.”

— Clarice Lispector

64. “And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming”. Wasn’t it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?”

— Clarice Lispector

65. “Why don’t clouds fall, since everything else does? Because gravity is less than the strength of the air that keeps them up there. Clever, right? Yes, but one day they fall as rain. That is my revenge.”

— Clarice Lispector

66. “She knew what desire was – though she didn’t know she knew. It was like this: she was starving but not for food, it was a kind of painful taste that rose from the pit of her stomach and made her nipples quiver and her arms empty without an embrace.”

— Clarice Lispector

67. “Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. My heart has emptied itself of every desire and been reduced to its own final or primary beat.”

— Clarice Lispector

68. “I am finding myself: it’s deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I’ll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I’ll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It’s as life said the following: and there simply was no following.”

— Clarice Lispector

69. “I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.”

— Clarice Lispector

70. “For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.”

— Clarice Lispector

71. “There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky.”

— Clarice Lispector

72. “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

73. “The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.”

— Clarice Lispector

74. “I ask: will she ever someday know love’s farewell? Will she ever someday know the swoonings of love? Will she take in her own way the sweet journey? I know nothing. What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone.”

— Clarice Lispector

75. “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

76. “First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself ‘Who am I?‘, she would fall flat on her face. For the question ‘Who am I?’ creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.”

— Clarice Lispector

77. “A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses – in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.”

— Clarice Lispector

78. “The word is my fourth dimension.”

— Clarice Lispector

79. “I don’t want beauty, I want identity.”

— Clarice Lispector

80. “She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears.”

— Clarice Lispector

81. “Nothing is more difficult than surrendering to the instant. That difficulty is human pain. It is ours. I surrender in words and surrender when I paint.”

— Clarice Lispector

82. “And giving myself over with the confidence of belonging to the unknown. For I can pray only to what I do not know. And I can love only the unknown evidence of things and can add myself only to what I do not know. Only that is a real giving of oneself.”

— Clarice Lispector

83. “But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is. I am at its core. I still am. I am at the living and soft centre. Still. It sparkles and is elastic.”

— Clarice Lispector

84. “The courage to be something other than what one is, to give birth to oneself, and to leave one’s former body on the ground. And without having answered to anyone about whether it was worthwhile.”

— Clarice Lispector

85. “I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening...”

— Clarice Lispector

86. “At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.”

— Clarice Lispector

87. “To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait, has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read ‘absent-minded’.”

— Clarice Lispector

88. “I write very simple and very naked. That’s why it wounds. I’m a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.”

— Clarice Lispector

89. “I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret – that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what’s behind thought?”

— Clarice Lispector

90. “Since God doesn’t have a name, I’ll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn’t come from any language. I give myself the name Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.”

— Clarice Lispector

91. “That not-knowing might seem awful but it’s not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you’re born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if she’d learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it’s everyone’s moment of glory and it’s when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.”

— Clarice Lispector

92. “Instead of obtaining myself by fleeing, I find myself forsaken, alone, tossed into a dimensionless cubicle, where light and shadow are quiet ghosts. In my interior I find the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. If I were to scream – already without lucidity I imagine – my voice would receive the same, indifferent echo of the walls of the earth.”

— Clarice Lispector

93. “I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”

— Clarice Lispector

94. “I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air – I write because I so deeply want to speak.”

— Clarice Lispector

95. “She had pacified life so well, taken such care for it not to explode. She had kept it all in serene comprehension, separated each person from the rest, clothes were clearly made to be worn and you could choose the evening movie from the newspaper – everything wrought in such a way that one day followed another.”

— Clarice Lispector

96. “But if I hope to understand in order to accept things – the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however that only by walking do you know how to walk and – miracle – find yourself walking.”

— Clarice Lispector

97. “My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.”

— Clarice Lispector

98. “Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.”

— Clarice Lispector

99. “Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.”

— Clarice Lispector

100. “When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.”

— Clarice Lispector