Quotes from Clarice Lispector

O que não sei dizer é mais importante do que o que eu digo.

Haber nacido me ha estropeado la salud.

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

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.

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

And it's inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.

She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed

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

I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me.

I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy. Often before falling asleep - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and enter the greater world - often, before having the courage to go toward the greatness of sleep, I pretend that someone is holding my hand and I go, go toward the enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even then I can't find the courage, then I dream.

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I'm subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.

Por te falar eu te assustarei e te perderei? mas se eu não falar eu me perderei, e por me perder eu te perderia.

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?

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

I work only with lost and founds.

But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can't walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.