Quotes from Clarice Lispector

Eu escrevo à meia-noite porque sou escuro. Ângela escreve de dia porque é quase sempre luz alegre.

I must ask, without knowing whom I should ask, if it is really necessary to love the man who slays me; to ask who among you is slaying me. My life, stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs. It warns me that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I should perish in the end. If it be so, so be it.

I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you through and through, by means of an incantation that comes from me to you. To stretch out savagely while an inflexible geometry vibrates behind everything.

Sometimes only a lie can save you.

Ainda que eu seja mais uma ninguém a vagar sem rosto pelas rodas de livros, pelas prateleiras, tenho a sensação de ser uma penetra. Tanta coisa escrita, tanta gente escrevendo. Por que eu escrevo? O que eu tenho a dizer que já não tenha sido dito de milhares de maneiras diferentes? A quem interessa o meu corpo de letras?

Que não se acorde quem está todo ausente, quem está absorto está sentindo o pesos das coisas.

So i dedicate this thing here to old Schu­mann and his sweet Clara who today alas are bones. I dedicate it to the very crimson color scarlet like my blood of a man in his prime and so I dedicate it to my blood. I dedicate it above all to the gnomes, dwarfs, sylphs, and nymphs who inhabit my life. I dedicate it to the memory of my former poverty, when everything was more sober and dignified and I had never eaten lobster.

She kept going: why put it off? Yes, why put it off? she asked herself. And her question was solid, demanding a serious answer.

A man told me that in the Talmud it says there are things that can be said to many people, others to few people, and others to no one. To which I would add: there are certain things I don't even want to tell myself.

The room was the opposite of what I'd created in my home, the opposite of the soft beauty I'd made from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and absentminded irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.

I am alone in the world and I don't believe in anyone, everyone lies, sometimes even when making love, I don't think one being speaks to another, the truth only comes to me when I'm alone.

When she was a little girl, her aunt, in order to frighten her, insisted that the vampire - the ones that sucks human blood by biting its victims in the flesh of the neck - casts no reflection in the mirror. She reckoned that it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire, for the blood would add a touch of punk to her sallow complexion. For she gave the impression of having no blood unless a day might come when she would have to spill it.

Ultrapassar a dor é a pior crueldade

The eroticism inherent in living things is scattered through the air, in the sea, in the plants, in us, scattered in the vehemence of my voice, I'm writing you with my voice...

When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

God belongs to those who manage to get him. God appears when you're distracted.

?injenice su zvu?ne, ali izme?u njih postoji šapat.

Bastou vê-lo para torná-lo imediatamente sua goiabada-com-queijo.

Nenhuma felicidade ou infelicidade tinha sido tão forte que tivesse transformado os elementos de sua matéria, dando-lhe um caminho único, como deve ser o verdadeiro caminho.

Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language. I give myself the name Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.

E nasci para escrever. A palavra é o meu domínio sobre o mundo.

However what Joana has inside her is something stronger than the love that people give and what she has inside her demands more than the love that people receive.

when art is good it is because it touched upon the inexpressive, the worst art is expressive, that art which trangresses the piece of iron and the piece of glass, and the smile, and the scream.

Quiero poseer los átomos del tiempo. Y quiero capturar el presente que, por su propia naturaleza, me esta prohibido, el presente se me escapa, la actualidad huye, la actualidad soy yo siempre en presente.