Clarice Lispector Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting

Clarice Lispector
I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.

Clarice Lispector
Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Clarice Lispector
Perhaps I have not been made for the pure, expansive waters, but for those which are small and readily accesible. And perhaps my craving for another source, which gives me the expression of someone in search of food, perhaps this craving is a whim - and nothing more. Yet surely those rare moments of self-confidence, of blind existence, of happiness as intense and serene as an organ playing - surely those moments prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this longing which consumes my whole being is not merely some whim? Moreover, that whim is the truth!

Clarice Lispector
You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.

Clarice Lispector
The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

Clarice Lispector
I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

Clarice Lispector
Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

Clarice Lispector
How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?

Clarice Lispector
But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I'm subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.

Clarice Lispector
Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

Clarice Lispector
It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Clarice Lispector
The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

Clarice Lispector
Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

Clarice Lispector
I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

Clarice Lispector
Coherence, I don't want it any more. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder. I can only guess at it through a vehement incoherence.

Clarice Lispector
What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

Clarice Lispector
In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Clarice Lispector
At first she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to school in the middle of the woods, of cats drinking milk from golden saucers. And her dreams became increasingly dense and acquired colours that were difficult to dilute into words.

Clarice Lispector
I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Clarice Lispector
Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage

Clarice Lispector
Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it.... The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

Clarice Lispector
Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.

Clarice Lispector
Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.

Clarice Lispector
There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.

Clarice Lispector