Why This World Quotes

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I’ve lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of ‘solitude of not belonging’ has started invading me like ivy on a wall.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“Everything touches me—I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”
― Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector