Clarice Lispector Quotes

But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today. (p58)

Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.

when I learned to read and write, I devoured books, and I thought that they were like trees, like animals, something that is born. I didn’t know there was an author behind it all. Eventually, I discovered that that’s how it was, and I said, “I want that, too.”

Without yet realizing that, for me, form and meaning are one single thing. The phrase arrives already made.

I just want to say that I write not for money but on impulse.

Oh God! Having just one life was so little.

I never know beforehand what I’m going to write. There are writers who start writing only when they have the book in their head. Not me. I just follow along, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up. Then I start understanding what I wanted.

What’s natural is supernatural, too. Don’t think that it’s very far off. What’s natural is already a mystery.

She sat down in a way that made her own weight "iron" her wrinkled skirt. She smoothed her hair, her blouse. Now, all she could do was wait. (beginning of "Gertrudes pede um conselho")

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. (p169)

(You even said that your liberation would be being able not to write.) CL: Of course! Writing is a burden!

I am not a professional writer, because I write only when I want to.

There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.

I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed (from "Another Couple of Drinks")

The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo. Then, silence. The bright stain of sunlight lengthens little by little over the lawn. It goes climbing up the red wall of the house, making the ivy glisten in a thousand dewy lights. It finds an opening, the window. It penetrates. And suddenly takes possession of the room, slipping past the light curtains standing guard.
Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude. The heat of the sun and its brightness fill the room. Luisa blinks. She frowns. Purses her lips. Opens her eyes, finally, and leaves them fixed on the ceiling. Little by little the day enters her body.