Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

253. “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

254. “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

255. “There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

257. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

260. “In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence – whether people or things – breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.”

— Clarice Lispector

261. “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

262. “I always liked to arrange things. I guess it’s my only real vocation. By putting things in order, I create and understand at the same time.”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

265. “For the first time in my life there was a full now. This was the greatest brutality that I had ever come up against.”

— Clarice Lispector

266. “I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad.”

— Clarice Lispector

267. “For her reality was too much to be believed.”

— Clarice Lispector

268. “The room was the opposite of what I’d created in my home, the opposite of the soft beauty I’d made from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and absentminded irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.”

— Clarice Lispector

269. “And I shall not wander “from thought to thought,” but from mood to mood. We shall be inhuman – as the loftiest conquest of man. Being is being beyond human. Being man does not work, being man has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I feel that this unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization for which we longed. Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.”

— Clarice Lispector

270. “I am going to create what happened to me. Only because living isn’t tellable. Living isn’t livable. I shall have to create upon life. And without lying. Yes to creation, no to lying. Creation isn’t imagination, it’s running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality.”

— Clarice Lispector

271. “Suddenly I’ve become so restless that I’m capable of saying “That is enough” and ending what I’m writing you, which is based mostly on blind words.”

— Clarice Lispector

272. “De toekomst had tenminste het voordeel niet het heden te zijn, wat slecht is kan altijd beter worden.”

— Clarice Lispector

273. “In my core I have the strange impression that I don’t belong to the human species.”

— Clarice Lispector

274. “What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone.”

— Clarice Lispector

275. “Feit is dat ik een levenslot in handen heb en me toch niet bij machte voel om vrijuit te scheppen: ik volg de verborgen lijn van het noodlot. Ik kan niet anders dan een waarheid zoeken die me te boven gaat.”

— Clarice Lispector

276. “Ik zekere zin gingen de zaken zo goed dat ze alleen maar erg slecht zouden kunnen gaan want wat helemaal rijp is kan gaan rotten.”

— Clarice Lispector

277. “A man told me that in the Talmud it says there are things that can be said to many people, others to few people, and others to no one. To which I would add: there are certain things I don’t even want to tell myself.”

— Clarice Lispector

278. “Should I say that she was crazy about soldiers? Well she was. Whenever she saw one, she thought with a shiver of pleasure: is he going to kill me?”

— Clarice Lispector

279. “Only once did she ask a tragic question: who am I? It frightened her so much that she completely stopped thinking.”

— Clarice Lispector

280. “Yes, she was happy inside her neurosis. War neurosis.”

— Clarice Lispector

281. “I’m writing about the meager minimum adorning it with purple, jewels and splendor. Is this how you write? No, it’s not by accumulation but by stripping naked. But I fear nakedness, since it is the last word.”

— Clarice Lispector

282. “And I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again.”

— Clarice Lispector

283. “The night that wouldn’t, and wouldn’t, and wouldn’t come, that was impossible. And her love that now was impossible – that was dry the way the fever of someone who doesn’t sweat was love without opium or morphine. And “I love you” was a splinter you couldn’t remove with tweezers. A splinter buried in the toughest part of the sole of your foot.”

— Clarice Lispector

284. “The last time I came down from the enchanted saddle, my human sadness was so great that I swore never to again. The ride, however, continues on in me. I converse, I clean the house, I smile, but I know that the ride is within me.”

— Clarice Lispector

285. “Since I am, the thing to do is to be.”

— Clarice Lispector

286. “She’d heard on Clock Radio that there were seven billion people in the world. She felt lost. But with the tendency she had to be happy she immediately consoled herself: there were seven billion people to help her.”

— Clarice Lispector

287. “Living is like being tired and not being able to sleep.”

— Clarice Lispector

288. “What trips up my life is writing.”

— Clarice Lispector

289. “She transformed herself into organic simplicity. And she’d figured out how to find in simple and honest things the grace of sin.”

— Clarice Lispector

290. “My expectations closed the world to me.”

— Clarice Lispector

291. “In my interior I find the silence I seek.”

— Clarice Lispector

292. “Do you know it’s a lie? That I didn’t dream about you?”

— Clarice Lispector

293. “Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because thus it had always been. Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn’t understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they’d need a pointing finger to give them their old names.”

— Clarice Lispector

294. “Will this story someday become my own congealing? How do I know. If there’s any truth in it – and of course the story is true though invented – may everyone recognize it in himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold – there are those who lack the delicate essential.”

— Clarice Lispector

295. “She expected nothing. She was in herself, the end itself.”

— Clarice Lispector

296. “Long live the dead because we live in them.”

— Clarice Lispector

297. “What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn’t knowing? If a person doesn’t look and doesn’t see, does the truth exist anyway? THe truth that doesn’t transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?”

— Clarice Lispector

298. “Elk ding is een woord.”

— Clarice Lispector

299. “Perhaps I now knew that I would never be equal to life myself, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root did exist.”

— Clarice Lispector

300. “I ask: was every story ever written in the world a story of affliction?”

— Clarice Lispector