Clarice Lispector quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Clarice Lispector on Wise Famous Quotes.

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.

She kept going: why put it off? Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. And her question was solid, demanding a serious answer.

The word is my fourth dimension.

but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.

I understand a hen, perfectly. I mean, the intimate life of a hen, I know how it is.

The greatness of every human being.

For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting.

I am only true when I'm alone.

Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.

But I've never known what to do with people and the things I like, sometimes they weigh me down, ever since I was a girl.

But what can I do if you are not touched by my defects, whereas I loved yours. My candour was crushed underfoot by you.

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.

Never suffer because you don't have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.

Facts and particulars annoy me.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

- How does it feel to have a daughter?
- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.

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

Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

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

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

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

As for music, where does it go? The only concrete thing in music is the instrument.

She felt the phrase "demand her rights" had lain inside her forever, waiting.

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

There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.

I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.

Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?

Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward.

I want shade, I want shade and anonymity.
from "The Departure

If you have kissed the wall, you can accept anything.

The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks.

Everything struck her at times as too precious, impossible to touch. And, at times, what people used as air to breathe, was weight and death for her.

And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.

Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy.

It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting

Suddenly I've become so restless that I'm capable of saying "That is enough" and ending what I'm writing you, which is based mostly on blind words.

Every idea that occurred to him, because he became familiar with it in seconds, came with the fear of having stolen it.

The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul.

Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.

Don't forget that for now it's strawberry season

Truth is always an inexplicable inner contact. Truth is unrecognizable. So it doesn't exist? No, For men it doesn't exist.

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.

For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.

I always give names to things

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.

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

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

Life really just barely escapes me though the certainty comes to me that life is other and has a hidden style

My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.

Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

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.

Ah, hand holding mine, if I hadn't needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life!

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

I'm so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.

Meanwhile the clouds are white & the sky is all blue. Why so much God? Why not a little for men.

I, who called love my hope for love.

As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it's not.

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.

I work only with lost and founds.

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.

Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.

The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.

I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.

But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

I don't know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.

I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten.

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

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.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.

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

I know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me.

The docks went to the heart of her life.

Real life is so secret that not even I, who am dying of it, have been given the password, I am dying without knowing of what.

Perhaps love is to give one's own solitude to others? For it is the very last thing we have to offer.

from "The Gift

It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it.

How do I explain that my greatest fear is precisely in relation to ... to being?" (5)

I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad.

It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.

Where does music go when it's not playing? - she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Its form doesn't matter: no form manages to circumscribe and alter it. Mirror is light. A tiny piece of mirror is always the whole mirror.

Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.

When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

What I have to say is superfluous for anyone who often feels the pangs of hunger

Living leaves me atremble.

God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted.

Inside her it was as if death didn't exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.

Passed (it strikes me that this God was extremely merciful to her: He gave her what He took away).

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

If the girl knew that my own joy also comes from my deepest sadness and that sadness was a failed joy.

I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not