Quotes from Clarice Lispector

Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

Ser feliz é uma responsabilidade muito grande. Pouca gente tem coragem. Tenho coragem mas com um pouco de medo. Pessoa feliz é quem aceitou a morte. Quando estou feliz demais, sinto uma angústia amordaçante: assusto-me.

Freedom isn't enough. What I desire doesn't have a name yet.

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.

everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off secret, radiating, luminous rays that would smother me if I didn't cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. God help me: I have no one to guide me and it's dark again.

She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.

Que ninguém se engane: só se consegue a simplicidade através de muito trabalho.

What I'm writing to you is not for reading— it's for being.

I write very simple and very naked. That's why it wounds. I'm a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.

Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.

To know when to quit. Whether to give up--this is often the question facing the gambler. No one is taught the art of walking away. And the anguish of deciding if I should keep playing is hardly unusual. Will I be able to quit honorably? or am I the type who waits stubbornly for something to happen? something like, for instance, the end of the world? or whatever it might be, maybe my own sudden death, in which case my decision to give up would be beside the point.

I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.

Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.

I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.

She was made entirely of a sweetness bordering on tears.

Whoever wishes may accompany me: the road is long, it's painful but it's lived.

Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.

I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.

Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.