Clarice Lispector Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Clarice Lispector
I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Clarice Lispector
I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

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

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

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

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
My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

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

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
Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

Clarice Lispector
No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

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

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

Clarice Lispector
Putting my hand in someone else's has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don't have courage, I dream.

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