Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.”

— Clarice Lispector

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Because the best phrase and always still the youngest, was: goodness makes me want to be sick. Goodness was lukewarm and light. It smelled of raw meat kept for too long. Without entirely rotting in spite of everything. It was freshened up from time to time, seasoned a little, enough to keep it a piece of lukewarm, quiet meat.”

— Clarice Lispector

107. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

109. “Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn’t even know it. As for me, I substitute the act of death for a symbol of it. A symbol that can be summed up in a deep kiss but not on a rough wall but mouth-to-mouth in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection.”

— Clarice Lispector

110. “I’m in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.”

— Clarice Lispector

111. “It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born and I can’t quite manage it.”

— Clarice Lispector

112. “As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.”

— Clarice Lispector

113. “Every day it will be the same thing: at dusk I begin to feel melancholy and pensive.”

— Clarice Lispector

114. “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

115. “If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me.”

— Clarice Lispector

116. “I just know that I don’t want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don’t believe in myself because my thought is invented.”

— Clarice Lispector

117. “There are truths I haven’t even told God. And not even myself. I am a secret under the lock of seven keys.”

— Clarice Lispector

118. “It is curious that I can’t say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can’t say it.”

— Clarice Lispector

119. “As soon as you discover the truth it’s already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it’s not.”

— Clarice Lispector

120. “How living hurt. Living was an open wound.”

— Clarice Lispector

121. “Where does music go when it’s not playing? – she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”

— Clarice Lispector

122. “There are those who have. And there are those who have not. It’s very simple: the girl had not. Hadn’t what? Simply this: she had not. If you get my meaning that’s fine. If you don’t, it’s still fine.”

— Clarice Lispector

123. “The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn’t do or say the things he thinks.”

— Clarice Lispector

124. “What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.”

— Clarice Lispector

125. “I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

126. “In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke the words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow.”

— Clarice Lispector

127. “I find the greatest serenity in hallucination.”

— Clarice Lispector

128. “What I’m writing to you is not for reading – it’s for being.”

— Clarice Lispector

129. “Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.”

— Clarice Lispector

130. “Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.”

— Clarice Lispector

131. “I’m not a synonym – I’m a proper noun.”

— Clarice Lispector

132. “Su cualidad era exactamente no tener cantidad, no ser mensurable ni divisible porque todo lo que se puede medir y dividir tiene un principio y un fin.”

— Clarice Lispector

133. “Death is an encounter with oneself.”

— Clarice Lispector

134. “I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I’ve always forgotten.”

— Clarice Lispector

135. “The doctor simply refused to take pity. And added: when you don’t know what to eat make a nice Italian spaghetti.”

— Clarice Lispector

136. “But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man’s greatest sorrows.”

— Clarice Lispector

137. “The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva.”

— Clarice Lispector

138. “Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”

— Clarice Lispector

139. “I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space.”

— Clarice Lispector

140. “Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it’s painful but it’s lived.”

— Clarice Lispector

141. “I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out – I can no longer see things clearly – my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.”

— Clarice Lispector

142. “I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.”

— Clarice Lispector

143. “She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

144. “Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.”

— Clarice Lispector

145. “I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into “purity”, our hands that are coarse and full of words.”

— Clarice Lispector

146. “I was now so much greater that I could no longer see myself. As great as a far-off landscape. I was far off. But perceptible in my furthest mountains and in my remotest rivers: the simultaneous present no longer scared me, and in the furthest extremity of me I could finally smile without even smiling. At last I was stretching beyond my sensibility.”

— Clarice Lispector

147. “Hers is an art that makes us want to know the woman; she is a woman who makes us want to know her art.”

— Clarice Lispector

148. “Eu antes era uma mulher que sabia distinguir as coisas quando as via. Mas agora cometi o erro grave de pensar.”

— Clarice Lispector

149. “I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.”

— Clarice Lispector

150. “Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.”

— Clarice Lispector