Quotes from Clarice Lispector

She'd heard on Clock Radio that there were seven billion people in the world. She felt lost. But with the tendency she had to be happy she immediately consoled herself: there were seven billion people to help her.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.

My life had been as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call one of them death. I had always been in life, it mattered little that it was not I properly speaking, not that thing that I customarily call "I." I had always been in life.

But this is not eternity, it is condemnation. How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of a cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things. Things know things as much as this… this something that I shall call pardon, if I wish to save myself within the human plan. It is pardon in itself. Pardon is one of the attributes of living matter.

O pior é que ela poderia riscar tudo o que pensara. Seus pensamentos eram, depois de erguidos, estátuas no jardim e ela passava pelo jardim olhando e seguindo o seu caminho.

desde la niñez no fue más que un corazón solitario que latía con dificultad en el espacio.

Ahora lo sé: soy sola. Yo y mi liberad que no sé usar. La gran responsabilidad de la soledad. Quien no está perdido no conoce la libertad y no la ama. En cuanto a mí, asumo mi soledad. Que a veces se extasía como ante los fuegos artificiales. Soy sola y tengo que vivir una cierta gloria íntima que en la soledad pueda convertirse en dolor. Y el dolor, en silencio.

For the first time in my life there was a full now. This was the greatest brutality that I had ever come up against.

The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, just like after a catastrophe, my culture had ended: I was merely a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own beginning. I had passed on to a first, primary plane, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper - at the first age of life.

Facts are words spoken by the world.

I, alive and glimmering like the instants, spark and go out, alight and go out, spark and go out.

I write because I have nothing else to do in the world: I was left over and there is no place for me in the world of men

I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all of this I won when I stopped loving you.

Escrevo por não ter nada a fazer no mundo: sobrei e não há lugar para mim na terra dos homens. Escrevo porque sou um desesperado e estou cansado, não suporto mais a rotina de me ser e se não fosse a sempre novidade que é escrever, eu me morreria simbolicamente todos os dias.

I'll miss myself so bad when I die.

She was supersonic in life. Nobody noticed that with her existence she was breaking the sound barrier. For other people she didn't exist.

Es la amante que no teme pues sabe que lo tendrá todo nuevamente

El domingo se levantaba más temprano aún para estar más tiempo sin hacer nada. El peor momento de su vida era el fin de la tarde de ese día: caía en una meditación inquieta, el vacío del domingo estéril.

I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva. I want this word: splendidness, splendidness is the fruit in its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want distances. My wild intuition about myself. But my main thing is always hidden. I am implicit. And when I make myself explicit I lose the humid intimacy.

quero não o que está feito mas o que tortuosamente ainda se faz. Minhas desequilibradas palavras são o luxo de meu silêncio.

The chicken lives as if in a dream. She has no sense of reality. All the chicken's fright comes because they're always interrupting her reverie. The chicken is a sound sleep. . . . The chicken has plenty of inner life. To be honest, the only thing the chicken really has is inner life. Our vision of her inner life is what we call "chicken.

Entonces se defendía de la muerte viviendo menos, gastando poco de su vida para que no se le acabara.

O mecanismo exige e exige a minha vida. Mas eu não obedeço totalmente: se te nho que ser um objeto, que seja um objeto que grita.

Suddenly I was crying. It was already love.