Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love that people receive.”

— Clarice Lispector

202. “Here I am ready for life! Dear sirs, no one’s looking at me, no one realises I exist! Yet, dear sirs, I exist, I swear that I exist! Very much, even. Look, all of you, with that triumphant attitude, look: I can vibrate, vibrate like the taunt of a harp. I can suffer with more intensity than any of you, gentleman. I am superior. And do you know why? Because I know I exist!”

— Clarice Lispector

203. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

205. “I realize now that it was a certain apathy, rather than peace, that turned my acts and my desires to ash.”

— Clarice Lispector

206. “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

207. “Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words – and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I’m scared of the moments in which I don’t use thought and that’s a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

— Clarice Lispector

208. “Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

210. “She felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.”

— Clarice Lispector

211. “Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language.”

— Clarice Lispector

212. “This book is like any other book. But I would be happy if it were only read by people whose souls are already formed. Those who know that the approach, of whatever it may be, happens gradually and painstakingly – even passing through the opposite of what it approaches. They who, only they, will slowly come to understand that this book takes nothing from no one. To me, for example, the character G. H. gave bit by bit a difficult joy; but it is called joy. C.”

— Clarice Lispector

213. “Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it.”

— Clarice Lispector

214. “It’s not a story that leads the reader to philosophical thoughts. And it’s not a philosophical treatise that needs a story to convey them. Instead, it is a vivifying experience that leads a person to the most ambitious philosophical discoveries. An experience transformed into literary art, in which harmony and disorder are the price of the revelation. A.”

— Clarice Lispector

215. “I feel happier with animals than with people. When I watch my horse cantering freely across the fields – I am tempted to put my head against his soft, vigorous neck and narrate the story of my life. When I stroke my dog on the head – I know that he doesn’t expect me to make sense or explain myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

216. “Never suffer because you don’t have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.”

— Clarice Lispector

217. “It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.”

— Clarice Lispector

218. “Nothing happened if she kept waiting for what was going to happen .”

— Clarice Lispector

219. “I, just from having felt affection, thought that loving is easy.”

— Clarice Lispector

220. “Suddenly I was crying. It was already love.”

— Clarice Lispector

221. “That night I’d already had quite a bit to drink. I wandered from bar to bar, until, excessively happy, I was afraid I’d outdo myself: I’d grown too comfortable in my own skin. I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed.”

— Clarice Lispector

222. “I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and never will end. Never.”

— Clarice Lispector

223. “But I’ve never known what to do with people and the things I like, sometimes they weigh me down, ever since I was a girl.”

— Clarice Lispector

224. “I’ve always liked putting things in their places. I think it’s my only true calling. By ordering things I create and understand at the same time... Ordering is finding the best form.”

— Clarice Lispector

225. “I want the shining gravel in a dark brook. I want the sparkle of the stone beneath the rays of sun, I want death that frees me. I could manage to have pleasure if I abstained from thinking. Then I’d feel the ebb and flow of air in my lungs.”

— Clarice Lispector

226. “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

227. “I feel as though I’ve already achieved what I wanted and I still don’t know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called ‘experience’?”

— Clarice Lispector

228. “And – and don’t forget that the structure of the atom cannot be seen but it nonetheless known. I know about lots of things I’ve never seen. And so do you. You can’t show proof of the truest thing of all, all you can do is believe. Weep and believe.”

— Clarice Lispector

229. “I was born a few instants ago and I am dimmed.”

— Clarice Lispector

230. “If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain.”

— Clarice Lispector

231. “Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn’t even know it.”

— Clarice Lispector

232. “I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want distances. My wild intuition about myself. But my main thing is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I make myself explicit I lose the humid intimacy.”

— Clarice Lispector

233. “My old life was necessary to me because it was precisely its error that made me take up imagining a hope that, without the life that I led, I wouldn’t have known.”

— Clarice Lispector

234. “I don’t have anything to nourish me: I eat myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

235. “Speaking for myself, I am only true when I’m alone. As a child, I always feared that I was about to fall off the face of the earth at any minute. Why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don’t you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain. That is my revenge.”

— Clarice Lispector

236. “It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I am born.”

— Clarice Lispector

237. “I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.”

— Clarice Lispector

238. “Last night – it’s hard to explain to you – last night I dreamed that I was dreaming. Could it be like that after death? the dream of a dream of a dream of a dream.”

— Clarice Lispector

239. “And even so, I had discovered, I was afraid to free myself. “That” had grown too much inside me, leaving me full. I’d be helpless if I were ever cured. After all, what was I now, I felt, but a reflection? Were I to eradicate Daniel, I’d be a blank mirror.”

— Clarice Lispector

240. “An eye looked over my life. I probably called that eye sometimes “truth”, sometimes morality, sometimes human law, sometimes “God”, sometimes “myself”. For the most part I lived inside a mirror. Two minutes after I was born I had already lost my beginnings.”

— Clarice Lispector

241. “Life has no adjective. It’s a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now.”

— Clarice Lispector

242. “One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking...”

— Clarice Lispector

243. “All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

— Clarice Lispector

244. “Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.”

— Clarice Lispector

245. “Though everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off a secret that glows in luminous rays that would darken me if I didn’t cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. May the God help me: I am without a guide and it is dark once again.”

— Clarice Lispector

246. “Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it. – – – – – –.”

— Clarice Lispector

247. “No one can enter another’s heart.”

— Clarice Lispector

248. “She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.”

— Clarice Lispector

249. “Words are pebbles rolling in the river.”

— Clarice Lispector

250. “Night is our latent state. And it is so moist that plants are born. In houses the lights go out in order to hear the crickets more clearly, and so the grasshoppers can walk atop the leaves almost without touching them, the leaves, the leaves, the leaves – in the night the soft anxiety is transmitted through the hollow of the air, the void is a means of transport.”

— Clarice Lispector