Clarice Lispector Quotes

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don't know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience. I don't know what to do with it, I'm terrified of that profound disorganization. I'm not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn't know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It's that something that I'd like to call disorganization, and then I'd have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don't want to ground myself in what I experienced-in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don't have the capacity for another one. (beginning)

there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent. Why unspeaking? (p60)

“At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing. (p25)

This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is "The Murder." And also "How to Kill Cockroaches." So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don't contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights. (beginnning of "A quinta história")

…the greatest obstacle to my progress is me. I myself have been the biggest difficulty in my path. It’s with enormous effort that I’m able to overcome myself.

What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance. (p27)

The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. (p90)

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting (p17)

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

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")

What is written here...are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me. These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins. (p11)

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)

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 don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself (p109)

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