Quotes by Clarice Lispector

There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she hated nature sometimes.

Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.

Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the worlds wisdom could be contained & lost.

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.

She felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.

But she didn’t want to rest! – Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.

One day we shall domesticate him into a human being & then I shall be able to sketch him. For this is what we have done with ourselves & with God. The little boy will assist his own domestication; he is diligent & cooperative. He cooperates without knowing that the assistance we expect of him is for his own self-sacrifice. Recently, he has had much practice. And so he will go on progressing until little by little -- because of essential goodness with which we achieve our salvation -- he will pass from actual time to daily time, from meditation to expression, from existence to life. Making the great sacrifice of not being mad. I am not mad out of solidarity with thousands of people who, in order to construct the possible, have also sacrificed the truth which would constitute madness.

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

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.

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.

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam | She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed

I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of whats behind thought?

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 Im scared of the moments in which I dont use thought and thats 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?

What would a person say to himself in the madness of sincerity? But it would be salvation. Thought the terror of sincerity comes from the part of the shadows that connect me to the world and to the creating unconscious of the world. Today is a night with many stars in the sky. It stopped raining.

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery.

When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I havent looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.

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

I am finding myself: its deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. Ill tell you a secret: life is deadly. Ill have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. Its as life said the following: and there simply was no following.