Top 300 Clarice Lispector Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Yes, she was happy inside her neurosis. War neurosis.”

— Clarice Lispector

302. “Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form!”

— Clarice Lispector

303. “And I am in the world as free and slender as a deer on the plain. I get up as soft as a breath of air, raise my sleepy flower head, my feet light, I cross fields beyond the earth, world, time, God.”

— Clarice Lispector

304. “She was supersonic in life. Nobody noticed that with her existence she was breaking the sound barrier. For other people she didn’t exist.”

— Clarice Lispector

305. “She was falling into a sadness without pain. It wasn’t bad. It was part of life certainly. The next day she would probaly have some joy, also without the great ecstasies, just a little joy, and that wasn’t bad either.”

— Clarice Lispector

306. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

308. “All yearning is pursuit of pleasure. All remorse, pity, benevolence, is fear of it. All despair and seeking alternative routes are dissatisfaction. There you have it in a nutshell, if you wish. Do you understand?” “Yes.” “Those who deny themselves pleasure, who act like monks, in any sense, it’s because they have an enormous capacity for pleasure, a dangerous capacity – hence even greater fear. Only he who is afraid of shooting everyone keeps his guns under lock and key.”

— Clarice Lispector

309. “What can I do with happiness? What can I do with this strange and piercing peace, which is already starting to hurt me like an anguish, like a great silence of spaces? To whom can I give my happiness, which is already starting to scratch me a bit and scares me. No, I don’t want to be happy. I prefer mediocrity. Ah, thousands of people don’t have the nerve to linger a while longer in this unknown thing which is feeling happy and they prefer mediocrity.”

— Clarice Lispector

310. “Her existence was so complete and so connected to the truth that when it came time to give in and die she probably thought, if indeed she was in the habit of thinking: I never was.”

— Clarice Lispector

311. “But as long as I have myself I won’t be alone.”

— Clarice Lispector

312. “To write I begin by stripping myself of words. I prefer the poor words left over.”

— Clarice Lispector

313. “Parambolic – whatever that word means. Parambolic that I am. I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up.”

— Clarice Lispector

314. “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

315. “Everything imprecise, but suddenly in imprecision she found a clearness that she had only sensed and hadn’t been able to possess entirely. Perturbed she thought: everything, everything. Words are pebbles rolling in the river. It wasn’t happiness that she felt then, but what she felt was fluid, sweetly amorphous, resplendent instant, somber instant.”

— Clarice Lispector

316. “Its form doesn’t matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.”

— Clarice Lispector

317. “God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you’re distracted.”

— Clarice Lispector

318. “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

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

321. “I humbly ask to be allowed to exist, I humbly beg for a little happiness, an act of grace, I ask to be allowed to suffer less, I ask to be less beset by painful experiences, I ask men and women to consider me a human being worthy of a little love and respect. I ask for the blessing of life.”

— Clarice Lispector

322. “Suicides often kill themselves because they are afraid of death. They can’t stand the mounting tension of life and the wait for the worst to happen – and they kill themselves to be free of the threat.”

— Clarice Lispector

323. “Read the energy that is in my silence.”

— Clarice Lispector

324. “The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun. And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory.”

— Clarice Lispector

325. “I then felt like a tiger with a deadly arrow buried in its flesh and who was slowly circling the fearful people to find out who would have the courage to come up and free it from its pain. And then there is the person who knows that a wounded tiger is only as dangerous as a child. And coming up to the beast, unafraid to touch it, pulls out the embedded arrow.”

— Clarice Lispector

326. “She craved for even more: to be constantly reborn, to cut away everything she had learned, that she had seen, and to make a fresh start in some new terrain where even the most trifling act might have some meaning, where she might breathe air as if for the very first time. She had the feeling that dense life was flowing slowly inside her, bubbling like a sheet of hot lava.”

— Clarice Lispector

327. “And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory.”

— Clarice Lispector

328. “Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that’s the ultimate thing you can give of yourself.”

— Clarice Lispector

329. “Elk ding is een woord.”

— Clarice Lispector

330. “It’s because I don’t want to be platonic in relation to myself. I’m profoundly defeated by the world I live in. I separated myself just for a while because of my defeat and because I felt that other people were defeated too. So I closed myself up in an individualization that if I hadn’t been careful could have been transformed into a hysterical or contemplative solitude.”

— Clarice Lispector

331. “The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul.”

— Clarice Lispector

332. “It is curious that I can’t say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can’t say it. More than anything, I’m afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.”

— Clarice Lispector

333. “When I reread what I’ve written, I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.”

— Clarice Lispector

334. “That urge to feel wicked so as to deepen the sweetness into awfulness. And that little wickedness of whoever has a body.”

— Clarice Lispector

335. “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

336. “And maybe my desire for another spring, this keenness that gives my face the look of one who hunts to eat, maybe this keenness is just an idea – and nothing more. However – the rare instants I sometimes come by of sufficiency, of blind life, of happiness as intense and serene as organ music – don’t these instants prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this is the longing of my entire being and not just an idea?”

— Clarice Lispector

337. “Her courage came from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.”

— Clarice Lispector

338. “I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.”

— Clarice Lispector

339. “Only later did she think with satisfaction: I’m a typist and a virgin, and I like coca-cola.”

— Clarice Lispector

340. “Being happy is for what?”

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

342. “I’d like to know: once you’re happy what happens? What comes next?” she repeated obstinately.”

— Clarice Lispector

343. “How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it.”

— Clarice Lispector

344. “So she repented. Since she wasn’t quite sure for what, she repented entirely and for everything.”

— Clarice Lispector

345. “What am I, at this moment? A flat, silent leaf that has fallen to the ground. No gust of air swaying it.”

— Clarice Lispector

346. “She was so vulnerable. Did she hate herself for it? No, she’d hate herself more if she were already a trunk immutable until death, only capable of yielding fruit but not of growing within itself.”

— Clarice Lispector