Clarice Lispector > Quotes

“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, Stream Of Life

“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, A Hora Da Estrela

“O que não sei dizer é mais importante do que o que eu digo.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora Da Estrela

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“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, A Hora Da Estrela

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Por te falar eu te assustarei e te perderei? mas se eu não falar eu me perderei, e por me perder eu te perderia.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.”
― Clarice Lispector

“Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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

“Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

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

“Quando se ama não é preciso entender o que se passa lá fora, pois tudo passa a acontecer dentro de nós”
― Clarice Lispector

“The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I work only with lost and founds.”
― Clarice Lispector

“But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“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, The Passion According to G.H.

“I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Haber nacido me ha estropeado la salud.”
― 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, The Passion According to G.H.

“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

“No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.