Quotes from Clarice Lispector

A feiura é o meu estandarte de guerra. Eu amo o feio com um amor de igual para igual.

Cerra as janelas do quarto — não ver, não ouvir, não sentir. Na cama silenciosa, flutuante na escuridão, aconchega-se como no ventre perdido e esquece. Tudo é vago, leve e mudo.

Today I woke up feeling such nostalgia for happiness. My whole life I've never been free. I always persecuted myself within me. I've became intolerable to myself. I live in the dilacerating duality. I have an apparent freedom but I am imprisoned inside me.

Ainda bem que o que eu vou escrever já deve estar na certa de algum modo escrito em mim

What can you do with the truth that everyone's a little sad and a little alone.

Speaking for myself, I am only true when I'm alone. As a child, I always feared that I was about to fall off the face of the earth at any minute. Why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don't you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain. That is my revenge.

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

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

To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait , has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read 'absent-minded'.

Escribo como si fuera a salvar la vida de alguien. Probablemente mi propia vida.

Talvez a nordestina já tivesse chegado à conclusão de que a vida incomoda bastante, alma que não cabe bem no corpo, mesmo alma rala como a sua.

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

às vezes não se tem o que escrever mesmo quando se tem o que falar.

é assim porque é assim. Existe no mundo outra resposta? Se alguém sabe de uma melhor, que se apresente e a diga, estou há anos esperando.

que os mortos me ajudem a suportar o quase insuportável, já que de nada me valem os vivos.

Vejo que tentei dar a Maca uma situação minha: eu preciso de algumas horas de solidão por dia senão "me muero".) Quanto a mim, só sou verdadeiro quando estou sozinho.

What did I know about whatever it was that others obviously saw in me? how would I know if I went around with my stomach pressed into the dust of the ground. Truth has no witness? being isn't knowing? If a person doesn't look and doesn't see, does the truth exist anyway? THe truth that doesn't transmit itself even to those who can see. Is that the secret of being a person?

A veces tengo la impresión de que escribo por simple curiosidad intensa. Es que, al escribir, me doy las sorpresas más inesperadas.

Then, born again from her womb, it rose again, beseeching in a swelling wave, that urge to kill.

In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body.

The night that wouldn't, and wouldn't, and wouldn't come, that was impossible. And her love that now was impossible—that was dry the way the fever of someone who doesn't sweat was love without opium or morphine. And "I love you" was a splinter you couldn't remove with tweezers. A splinter buried in the toughest part of the sole of your foot.

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

On Sundays she got up early in order to have more time to do nothing.

There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.