Água Viva 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, The Stream of Life

“You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“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, The Stream of Life

“I’m restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh, like barbs. If I can hold so much love within me, and nevertheless continue to be uneasy, it’s because I need God to come. Come, before it’s too late. I’m in danger, as is everyone who’s alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“… everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off secret, radiating, luminous rays that would smother me if I didn’t cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. God help me: I have no one to guide me and it’s dark again.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“What am I in this instant? I’m a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven’t been human for a long time. They wanted me to be an object. I am an object. An object dirty with blood. An object that creates other objects and the machine creates us all. It makes demands. Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don’t totally obey: if I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There’s something inside of me that hurts. Oh, how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears aren’t there in the machine that is me. I’m an object without a destiny. I’m an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of what’s inside the object behind the behind of the thought-feeling. I’m an urgent object.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“To write you I first cover myself with perfume.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“What is a mirror? It’s the only invented material that is natural. Whoever looks at a mirror, whoever manages to see it without seeing himself, whoever understands that its depth consists of being empty, whoever walks inside its transparent space without leaving the trace of his own image upon it—that somebody has understood its mystery of thing. For that to happen one must surprise it when it’s alone, when it’s hanging in an empty room, without forgetting that the finest needle before it can transform it into the simple image of a needle, so sensitive is the mirror in its quality of lightest reflection, only image and not the body. Body of the thing.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all this I gained when I stopped loving you.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“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, The Stream of Life

“In my core I have the strange impression that I don't belong to the human species”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I'm not a synonym—I'm a proper noun.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“I don’t know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is. I am at its core. I still am. I am at the living and soft centre. Still. It sparkles and is elastic.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Last night — it's hard to explain to you — last night I dreamed that I was dreaming. Could it be like that after death? the dream of a dream of a dream of a dream.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“It suddenly occurred to me that you don't need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn't even exist: I am born.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“Esta é a vida vista pela vida. Posso não ter sentido mas é a mesma falta de sentido que tem a veia que pulsa.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“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, Água Viva

“the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“For each one of us and at some lost moment of life—is a mission announced that we must accomplish? I however refuse any mission. I won’t accomplish anything: I just live.
[...]
Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary. I am piecemeal. My story is living. And I have no fear of failure. Let failure annihilate me, I want the glory of falling. My crippled angel who contorts all elusive, my angel who fell from the heavens to the hell where he lives savoring evil.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva