Quotes by Clarice Lispector

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

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

but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

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?Dont forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didnt know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesnt know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.

It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.

Long live the dead because we live in them.

But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insects wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called freedom is free as an act of thought. Its so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.

Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the authors need to thinking - he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the everything. But everything is a quanitity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers adn where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling.

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What Im saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was becoming. Wasnt it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?

When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. 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 pale at the mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.

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

Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into purity, our hands that are coarse and full of words.