Quotes from Clarice Lispector

I must not forget, I thought, that I have been happy, that I am being happier than one can be. But I forgot, I've always forgotten.

things are very delicate. People tread upon them with too many human feet, with too many sentiments. Only the delicacy of innocence or only the delicacy of the initiate senses its almost nonexistent taste. Before, I needed seasoning for everything, and in that way I skipped over the thing and tasted the taste of the seasoning.

Liberdade é pouco. O que eu desejo ainda não tem nome.

I want to seize my is. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air. And my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by an hallelujah.

I am obscure to myself. I let myself happen. I unfold only in the now. I am rudely alive.

Never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? How could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don't understand what I'm saying. And so I adore it.

There are truths I haven't even told God. And not even myself. I am a secret under the lock of seven keys.

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

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.

Estou tão assustada que só poderei aceitar que me perdi se imaginar que alguém me está dando a mão.

I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.

The terrible duty is that of going all the way to the end. And without relying on anyone. To live oneself.

Are we fruit of the same tree? No - Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo. Angela is my reverberation.

Would it be simplistic to think the moral problem with regards to others consists in behaving as one ought to, and the moral problem with regards to oneself is managing to feel what one ought to?

She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry.

Yes, she felt a perfect animal inside her. The thought of one day setting this animal loose disgusted her. Perhaps for fear of lack of aesthetic. Or dreading a revelation… No, no, she repeated, you mustn't be afraid to create.

I'm no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.

my qualities are so small, the same of those of other men, my flaws, my negative side is beautiful and concave like an abyss. What I am not would leave an enormous hole in the earth.

La coherencia es mutilación. Quiero el desorden

But the most important word in the language has but two letters: is. Is. I am at its core. I still am. I am at the living and soft centre. Still. It sparkles and is elastic.

The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't do or say the things he thinks.

I'm not a synonym—I'm a proper noun.

I'm so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.