Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Me acostumbro pero no me amanso.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

163. “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

164. “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

165. “Living leaves me atremble.”

— Clarice Lispector

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

169. “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

170. “And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void.”

— Clarice Lispector

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

179. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

182. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Do not be frightened. Death is instantaneous and passes in a flash. I know, for I have just died with the girl. Forgive my dying. It was unavoidable.”

— Clarice Lispector

187. “I had reached nothingness, and the nothingness was live and moist.”

— Clarice Lispector

188. “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

189. “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.”

— Clarice Lispector

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

194. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

196. “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

197. “The world rolls and somewhere out there are things I don’t know. Let us sleep on God and mystery, a quiet, fragile ship floating on the sea, behold sleep.”

— Clarice Lispector

198. “Twelve years weigh on a person like pounds of lead. The days melt into one another, merge to form one whole block, a big anchor. And the person is lost.”

— Clarice Lispector

199. “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.”

— Clarice Lispector

200. “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