Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots of a rare tree, that’s how I write to you, and those roots as if they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires for fulfillment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and needs the approval of God: that is creation.”

— Clarice Lispector

102. “Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality – the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

103. “She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.”

— Clarice Lispector

104. “Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the stronger side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arms of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy.”

— Clarice Lispector

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Mis desequilibradas palabras son el lujo de mi silencio.”

— Clarice Lispector

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

113. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

121. “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

122. “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

123. “Death is an encounter with oneself.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “Everything struck her at times as too precious, impossible to touch. And, at times, what people used as air to breathe, was weight and death for her.”

— Clarice Lispector

136. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “I don’t know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.”

— Clarice Lispector

142. “I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

145. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

147. “I knew that cockroaches could go more than a month without food or water. And they could even survive on wood for food. And even after you step on them they come apart slowly and keep on walking all the while. Even when they freeze, after they thaw out they keep on going. For three hundred and fifty million years, they have reproduced with no change. When the world was practically naked, they walked slowly across it.”

— Clarice Lispector

148. “When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open pale at the mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.”

— Clarice Lispector

149. “I’m blinder than before. I did see, I really did. I was terrified by the raw truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that for me to admit that I am as alive as it is – and my most hideous discovery is that I am as alive as it is – I shall have to raise my consciousness of life outside to so high a point that it would amount to a crime against my personal life.”

— Clarice Lispector

150. “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