Quotes from Clarice Lispector

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

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

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

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

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

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

Facts and particulars annoy me.

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.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

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

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

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

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

I, who called love my hope for love.

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

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.

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

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

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

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

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