Quotes from Clarice Lispector

Don't you remember you once told me: 'today's pain will be your joy tomorrow; there is nothing that escapes transfiguration.' Don't you remember? Maybe it wasn't exactly like that...

Soledad es tener sólo destino humano. Y soledad es no necesitar. No necesitar deja a un hombre muy solo, totalmente solo.

Estar vivo é uma grossa indiferença irradiante.

La inspiración es como un misterio olor a ambar".

After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open at the pale mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.

Eu queria iniciar uma experiência e não apenas ser vítima de uma experiência não autorizada por mim, apenas acontecida.

She had survived like a still-moist microbe among the scorching-hot, dry rocks, thought Joana. On that already old afternoon (a circle of life closed, work finished), the afternoon she had received the man's note, she had chosen a new path. Not to run away, but to go. To use her father's untouched money, the inheritance abandoned until now, and roam, roam, be humble, suffer, be shaken to her core, without hopes. Above all without hopes

Esperar menos não significa desistir. Antes se surpreender, do que se decepcionar.

If my life is transformed into it-self, the thing I today call sensitivity will not exist — it will be called indifference. But I cannot yet grasp that way. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we are finally no longer what we feel and think: we shall have something that more closely resembles a "mood" than an idea. We shall be the living matter revealing itself directly, ignorant of word, surpassing thought which is always grotesque.

Para mim não existem nunca lugares, existem pessoas.

En definitiva, en esa búsqueda del placer está resumida la vida animal. La vida humana es más compleja: se resume en la busca del placer, en su temor, y sobre todo en la insatisfacción de los intervalos.

It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it. More than anything, I'm afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.

It's like having a coin and not knowing in which country it is legal tender.

And now I was starting to let it touch me. In truth I had fought all my life against the profound desire to let myself be touched—and I had fought because I couldn't allow myself the death of what I called my goodness; the death of human goodness. But now I no longer wanted to fight it. There had to be a goodness so other that it wouldn't resemble goodness. I no longer wanted to fight.

One is the silence of the other. The killers who meet: the world is extremely reciprocal. The quivering of an entirely mute rattling in the rock; and we, who made it to today, are still quivering with it.

El amor ya está, siempre está. Falta sólo el golpe de gracia —que se llama pasión.

Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me and I don't know how to speak - reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier.

God perches in a tree chirping and straight lines travel on unfinished, horizontal and cold. That's what it seems like . . . The moments keep dripping ripe and no sooner has one tumbled than another rises up, somewhat, its face pale and tiny. Suddenly the moments end too. Timelessness trickles through my walls, tortuous and blind. It slowly collects in a dark, quiet pool and I shout: I've lived!

Don't you think there's a sinister emptiness in everything? Yes, there is. While we wait for the heart to understand.

E a morte, que era para ser uma única boa vez, não: está sendo sem parar.

Toda compreensão súbita é finalmente a revelação de uma aguda incompreensão. Todo momento de achar é um perder-se a si próprio.

The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor one works at beneath the apparent labor, life is a secret mission. So secret is the true life that not even to me, who am dying of it, can the password be entrusted, I die without knowing wherefrom. And the secret is such that, only if the mission manages to be accomplished shall I, in a flash, perceive that I was born in charge of it — every life is a secret mission.

I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me, and on the way home in the taxi I thought it'd be really funny if a taxi hit me and ran me over and I died after hearing all those good things

I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work. I'm restless and harsh and despairing. Although I do have love inside me. I just don't know how to use love. Sometimes it tears at my flesh. But when winter comes I give and give and give. The excess of me starts to hurt and when I'm excessive I have to give of myself.