Quotes from Clarice Lispector

I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air - I write because I so deeply want to speak.

Qué se puede hacer con la verdad de que todo el mundo esté un poco triste y un poco solo.

I'm in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.

No, no es fácil escribir. Es duro como partir rocas. Pero saltan chispas y astillas como aceros pulidos.

She transformed herself into organic simplicity. And she'd figured out how to find in simple and honest things the grace of sin.

She clutched him tightly, in alarm. She protected herself trembling. Because life was in peril. She loved the world, loved what had been created - she loved with nausea.

Me acostumbro pero no me amanso.

Nothing that I am not can interest me, it is impossible to be anything more than what you are.

O horrível dever é o de ir até o fim. E sem contar com ninguém. Viver-se a si mesma. E para sofrer menos embotar-me um pouco. Porque não posso mais carregar as dores do mundo. Que fazer quando sinto totalmente o que outras pessoas são e sentem? Vivo-as mas não tenho mais força.

I find the greatest serenity in hallucination.

Si es pobre, no me estará leyendo, porque leerme es superfluo para quien tiene una tenue hambre permanente.

My old life was necessary to me because it was precisely its error that made me take up imagining a hope that, without the life that I led, I wouldn't have known.

And I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again.

And may sapphires, amethysts and emeralds spill into the dark eroticism of abundant life: because in my darkness quakes at last the great topaz. I am now listening to a sylvan music, almost just drumming and rhythm that comes from a neighboring house where young junkies live the present. Another instant of incessant, incessant rhythm, and something terrible happens to me.

Do you know it's a lie? That I didn't dream about you?

Que la vida es así: se pulsa un botón y la vida se enciende. Sólo que ella no sabía cuál era el botón que había que pulsar. Ni se daba cuenta de que vivía en una sociedad tecnificada donde ella era un tornillo prescindible.

she was inept. Inept for living. She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.

Mientras tenga preguntas y no tenga respuesta continuaré escribiendo.

And giving myself over with the confidence of belonging to the unknown. For I can pray only to what I do not know. And I can love only the unknown evidence of things and can add myself only to what I do not know. Only that is a real giving of oneself.

My mystery is simple: I don't know how to be alive. - Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.

Com surpresa descobriu que o conhecia profundamente. Apenas superficialmente é que o desconhecia.

Desculpai-me mas vou continuar a falar de mim que sou meu desconhecido, e ao escrever me surpreendo um pouco pois descobri que tenho um destino. Quem já não se perguntou: sou um monstro ou isto é ser uma pessoa?

Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language.

she is a harmless virgin whom nobody needs. It strikes me that I don't need her either and that what I am writing could be written by another. Another writer, of course, but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out.