Quotes from Clarice Lispector

When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.

How does it feel to have a daughter? - At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.

She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time.

Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.

I don't want beauty, I want identity.

Perder-se é um achar-se perigoso.

Every day it will be the same thing: at dusk I begin to feel melancholy and pensive.

A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

Could it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?

Why don't clouds fall, since everything else does? Because gravity is less than the strength of the air that keeps them up there. Clever, right? Yes, but one day they fall as rain. That is my revenge.

Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.

For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.

I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.

How living hurt. Living was an open wound.

Because there are times when a person needs a little bitty death and doesn't even know it. As for me, I substitute the act of death for a symbol of it. A symbol that can be summed up in a deep kiss but not on a rough wall but mouth-to-mouth in the agony of pleasure that is death. I, who symbolically die several times just to experience the resurrection

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes.

She knew what desire was — though she didn't know she knew. It was like this: she was starving but not for food, it was a kind of painful taste that rose from the pit of her stomach and made her nipples quiver and her arms empty without an embrace.

I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

She exists as in dreams. She has no sense of reality. She gets nervous because people are always interrupting her daydreams.

Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.

I, who called love my hope for love.

As soon as you discover the truth it's already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it's not.

To write you I first cover myself with perfume.