Clarice Lispector Quotes

As for my Saturday-swaying outside the window in acacias and shadows-I preferred, instead of squandering it, to grasp it in my tight fist, where I crumpled it like a handkerchief. ("The Sharing of Loaves")

I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.

...jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul. (p135)

Oh God! Having just one life was so little.

Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond.

I was born in Ukraine, but already fleeing. My parents stopped in a village that’s not even on the map, called Chechelnik, for me to be born, and came to Brazil, where I arrived when I was two months old. So calling me a foreigner is nonsense. I’m more Brazilian than Russian, obviously.

I have been sculpted into so many statues and haven't frozen in place ("Obsession")

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)

He was a being who chose. Among the thousand things he might have been, he had gone along choosing himself. In work for which he wore glasses, discerning whatever he could and using his damp hands to grope at whatever he couldn't see, the being kept choosing and therefore would indirectly choose himself. Bit by bit he had gathered himself into being. He kept separating, separating. (beginning of "Perfil de sêres eleitos")

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")

even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury. (p61)

I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void. (p36)

Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now. (p10)

She'd be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She'd never know how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic-it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one. The two of them were leaning over the fragile bridge and Virgínia was feeling her bare feet falter insecurely as if they were dangling atop the calm whirl of the waters. It was a violent and dry day, in broad fixed colors; the trees were creaking beneath the warm wind wrinkled by swift cool drafts. The thin and torn girlish dress was pierced by shivers of coolness. With her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge, Virginia was plunging her distracted eyes into the waters. Suddenly she'd frozen tense and light:
"Look!"

This is not a lament, it's the cry of a bird of prey. An iridescent and restless bird. The kiss upon the dead face.
I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.