A Breath of Life Quotes

“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“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, A Breath of Life

“I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Something broke in me and left me with a nerve split in two. In the beginning the extremities linked to the cut hurt me so badly that I paled in pain and perplexity. However the split places gradually scarred over. Until coldly, I no longer hurt. I changed, without planning to. I used to look at you from my inside outward and from the inside of you, which because of love, I could guess. After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in: I had transformed myself into a heap of facts and actions whose only root was in the domain of logic. At first I couldn't associate me with myself. Where am I? I wondered. And the one who answered was a stranger who told me coldly and categorically: you are yourself.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“To know when to quit. Whether to give up--this is often the question facing the gambler. No one is taught the art of walking away. And the anguish of deciding if I should keep playing is hardly unusual. Will I be able to quit honorably? or am I the type who waits stubbornly for something to happen? something like, for instance, the end of the world? or whatever it might be, maybe my own sudden death, in which case my decision to give up would be beside the point.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Ser feliz é uma responsabilidade muito grande. Pouca gente tem coragem. Tenho coragem mas com um pouco de medo. Pessoa feliz é quem aceitou a morte. Quando estou feliz demais, sinto uma angústia amordaçante: assusto-me.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I write very simple and very naked. That's why it wounds. I'm a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Are we fruit of the same tree? No - Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“Refugiei-me na doideira porque a razão não me bastava.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance.

Living is an act I did not premeditate. I blossomed in the dark. I am only valid for myself. I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I feel as though I've already achieved what I wanted and I still don't know what I achieved. Could that be the somewhat dubious and elusive thing vaguely called 'experience'?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“La consuelo haciéndole entender que también yo padezco la vasta e informe melancolía de haber sido creado.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“I want the shining gravel in a dark brook. I want the sparkle of the stone beneath the rays of sun, I want death that frees me. I could manage to have pleasure if I abstained from thinking. Then I’d feel the ebb and flow of air in my lungs.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life