Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

208. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

210. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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. “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

232. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

242. “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

243. “I’ll miss myself so bad when I die.”

— Clarice Lispector

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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