Clarice Lispector Quotes – Clarice Lispector was famous Brazilian novelist. She was born in Ukraine in 1920 with the birthname Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector that later became Clarice Lispector. As an infant her parents emigrated to Brazil, where she grew up and lived her life and wrote her novels and poems!
Some of Clarice Lispectors most famous works are Agua Viva and Family Ties as well as the great and mystic novel: The Passion According to G.H.
Here are some of the most famous Clarice Lispector quotes:
- “Well. For now I am dead. We’ll see if I can be born again.”
- “Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.”
- “Death is an encounter with oneself.”
- “Facts are words spoken by the world.”
- “For her reality was too much to be believed.”
- “From any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”
- “Her short stories read like perfect songs.”
Some of the best Clarice Lispector Quotes
- “I am afraid to be who I am. There is a total silence within me. I get scared.”
- “I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret – that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what’s behind thought?”
- “I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?”
- “I don’t want beauty, I want identity.”
- “I don’t know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.”
- “I had reached nothingness, and the nothingness was live and moist.”
- “I was born a few instants ago and I am dimmed.”
- “I, alive and glimmering like the instants, spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out.”
- “I, who called love my hope for love.”
One of the few recorded interviews with Clarice Lispector
This interview is recorded in Sau Paulo in 1977 in portueguese but with english subtitles:
More quotes from Clarice Lispector
- “And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”
- “At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.”
- “Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn’t even know it.”
- “I’ is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms.”
- “I’m not a synonym—I’m a proper noun.”
- “If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me.”
- “In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”
- “Inside her it was as if death didn’t exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.”
- “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.”
- “Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it. ——————”
- “Listen: I let you be, therefore let me be.”
- “Living demands such audacity.”
- “Living leaves me atremble.”
- “Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.”
- “My expectations closed the world to me.”
- “Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.”
Even more great Clarice Lispector Quotes
- “She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams.”
- “Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.”
- “The most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is.”
- “The sea, the sea’s swell, silent and breathless.”
- “The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.”
- “These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins.”
- “This is not a lament, it’s the cry of a bird of prey.”
- “To think is an act. To feel is a fact.”
- “What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being.”
- “Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
- “Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
- “Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.”
- “You who are reading me please help me to be born.”
- “I am telling of the instants that drip and are thick with blood.”
- “Look, haven’t you noticed, none of your questions have answers?”
- “Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.”
- “As soon as you discover the truth it’s already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it’s not.”
- “At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.
- “Because our living matter is greater than we are”
- “Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”
- “Dying is something else. Dying is different to good and bad.”
- “Every day it will be the same thing: at dusk I begin to feel melancholy and pensive.”
- “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.”
- ““For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.”
- “Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”
- “How living hurt. Living was an open wound.”
- “I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.”
- “I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.”
- “I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.”
- “I am only true when I’m alone.”
- “I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.”
- “I don’t have anything to nourish me: I eat myself”
- “I don’t miss it, because I have my childhood more now than when it was happening…”
- “I find the greatest serenity in hallucination.”
- “I know that what I am feeling is serious and has the power to destroy me.”
- “I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
- “I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. …”
- “If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain.”
- “In my interior I find the silence I seek.”
- “In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body.”
- “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.”
- “Living is like being tired and not being able to sleep.”
- “Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage”
- “Long live the dead because we live in them.”
- “My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it.”
- “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.”
- “Not having been born an animal is one of my secret nostalgias.”
- “Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.”
- “Nothing happened if she kept waiting for what was going to happen.”
- “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.”
- “One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking…”
- “Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.”
- “The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn’t do or say the things he thinks.”
The 10 last Clarice Lispector Quotes
- “The more we need, the more God exists.”
- “The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that’s a bit much.”
- “The word is my fourth dimension.”
- “The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
- “Then, born again from her womb, it rose again, beseeching in a swelling wave, that urge to kill.”
- “They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.”
- “To eat communion bread will be to taste the world’s indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.”
- “We’ve been keeping our deaths a secret so as to make our lives possible.”
- “Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it’s painful but it’s lived.”
- “Since life’s like that: you press a button and life lights up.”
- “So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”
A bit about Clarice Lispector
Birthname: Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector
Born: 10 December 1920
Died: 9 December 1977
Occupation: Writer and Poet
Awards: Best Translated Book Award (2013)
