Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

156. “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

157. “I’m so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.”

— Clarice Lispector

158. “She kept going: why put it off? Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. And her question was solid, demanding a serious answer.”

— Clarice Lispector

159. “It isn’t for us that cows’ milk comes forth, but we drink it. Flowers weren’t made for us to look at or for us to smell, and we look at them and smell them. The Milky Way doesn’t exist for us to know if its existence, but we know.”

— Clarice Lispector

160. “The sea, the sea’s swell, silent and breathless.”

— Clarice Lispector

161. “Nostalgia is not for the God who is missing to us, it is a nostalgia for ourselves, for we do not sustain ourselves; we miss our impossible grandeur – my unreachable nowness is my paradise lost.”

— Clarice Lispector

162. “On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.”

— Clarice Lispector

163. “And so I realise that I want for myself the vibrant substratum of the word repeated in a Gregorian chant. I’m aware that everything I know I cannot say, I know only by paining or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I have to use words for you, they must create an almost exclusively bodily meaning. I’m battling with the ultimate vibration. To tell you my substratum I make a sentence of words composed only of the now-instants.”

— Clarice Lispector

164. “What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I’m doing it right now: I’m following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that’s still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping.”

— Clarice Lispector

165. “And my fear, too, was different now: not the fear of someone who is still about to go in but the so much greater fear of someone who has gone in.”

— Clarice Lispector

166. “Me acostumbro pero no me amanso.”

— Clarice Lispector

167. “I know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me.”

— Clarice Lispector

168. “She clutched him tightly, in alarm. She protected herself trembling. Because life was in peril. She loved the world, loved what had been created – she loved with nausea.”

— Clarice Lispector

169. “Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it – and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But – I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.”

— Clarice Lispector

170. “Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what. And the secret is such that only if the mission is finally carried out do I, all of a sudden, see that I was born entrusted with it – all of life is a secret mission.”

— Clarice Lispector

171. “Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.”

— Clarice Lispector

172. “But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you.”

— Clarice Lispector

173. “Though I sometimes scream: I no longer want to be I! but I stick to myself and inextricably there forms a tessitura of life.”

— Clarice Lispector

174. “Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.”

— Clarice Lispector

175. “Then, born again from her womb, it rose again, beseeching in a swelling wave, that urge to kill.”

— Clarice Lispector

176. “Inside her it was as if death didn’t exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.”

— Clarice Lispector

177. “The future, at least, had the advantage of not being the present, and the worse can always take a turn for the better... For, strange though it may seem, she had faith. Composed of fine organic matter, she existed. Pure and simple.”

— Clarice Lispector

178. “It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.”

— Clarice Lispector

179. “Living leaves me atremble.”

— Clarice Lispector

180. “I was first drawn to you thinking you were going to teach me something more than that. I needed that which I sensed in you and which you have always denied.”

— Clarice Lispector

181. “Is woede mijn diepste verzet tegen het mens-zijn? Mens-zijn mat me af. En ik ben woedend om het voelen van zoveel liefde. Soms leef ik van de woede tegen het leven. Want de woede wekt me tot leven: ik heb me nooit zo waakzaam gevoeld. Ik weet best dat dit overgaat en dat het noodzakelijke ontberen terugkeert.”

— Clarice Lispector

182. “Nothing that I am not can interest me, it is impossible to be anything more than what you are.”

— Clarice Lispector

183. “My maturing of a theme would already be a cantabile aria – so let somebody else make another song – the song of the maturing of my quartet. This is before the maturing. The melody would be the fact.”

— Clarice Lispector

184. “In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body.”

— Clarice Lispector

185. “Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.”

— Clarice Lispector

186. “To write you I first cover myself with perfume.”

— Clarice Lispector

187. “Now I understand what a trial is. Trial: it means that life is trying me. But trial: means that I too am trying. And trying can become an ever more insatiable thirst.”

— Clarice Lispector

188. “Every idea that occurred to him, because he became familiar with it in seconds, came with the fear of having stolen it.”

— Clarice Lispector

189. “My life had been as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call one of them death. I had always been in life, it mattered little that it was not I properly speaking, not that thing that I customarily call “I.” I had always been in life.”

— Clarice Lispector

190. “The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, just like after a catastrophe, my culture had ended: I was merely a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own beginning. I had passed on to a first, primary plane, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper – at the first age of life.”

— Clarice Lispector

191. “Como se explica que o meu maior medo seja exatamente o de ir vivendo o que for sendo?”

— Clarice Lispector

192. “But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect’s wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.”

— Clarice Lispector

193. “Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.”

— Clarice Lispector

194. “Only then did she see that her life was miserable. She felt like crying when she saw her other side, she who, as I said, had always thought she was happy.”

— Clarice Lispector

195. “But I’m afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I’m afraid to start to “make” a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one? as a child thinks about the nothing. And run the risk of being crushed by chance.”

— Clarice Lispector

196. “The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn’t be afraid. If we are the world, we are moved by a delicate radar that guides.”

— Clarice Lispector

197. “At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing.”

— Clarice Lispector

198. “Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?”

— Clarice Lispector

199. “When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.”

— Clarice Lispector

200. “I’m going to start my exercise in courage, living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage.”

— Clarice Lispector