Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

210. “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

211. “The heart must present itself alone to the Nothing and alone beat out in silence its palpitations in the shadows. You only sense your own heart in your ears. When it presents itself completely naked, it’s not even communication, it’s submission. For we were only made for the little silence, not for the silence of the stars.”

— Clarice Lispector

212. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

221. “She was sitting there in her little housedress. He knew she’d done what she could to avoid becoming luminous and unattainable. Timidly and with respect, he was looking at her. He’d grown older, weary, curious. But he didn’t have a single word to say. From the open doorway he saw his wife on the sofa without leaning back, once again alert and tranquil, as if on a train. That had already departed.”

— Clarice Lispector

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

230. “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

231. “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

232. “I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.”

— Clarice Lispector

233. “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

234. “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

235. “In the sky, through the window, white clouds were coming undone, running loose from the calm blue.”

— Clarice Lispector

236. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

238. “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

239. “The eroticism inherent in living things is scattered through the air, in the sea, in the plants, in us, scattered in the vehemence of my voice, I’m writing you with my voice...”

— Clarice Lispector

240. “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

241. “I, alive and glimmering like the instants, spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out.”

— Clarice Lispector

242. “But she didn’t fear the moon because she was more lunar than solar and could see with wide-open eyes in the dark dawns the sinister moon in the sky. So she bathed all over in the lunar rays, as there are others who sunbathed. And was becoming profoundly limpid.”

— Clarice Lispector

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

246. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

248. “Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

250. “We shall be inhuman – as humankind’s greatest conquest. To be is to be beyond the human. To be a human being doesn’t do it, to be human has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I sense that that unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization we long for. Am I speaking of death? no, of life.”

— Clarice Lispector