Top 15 Clarice Lispector Quotes

...danger is what makes life precious.
Death is the constant danger of life.

He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith. (p141)

Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. (p144)

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

...write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart. (p100)

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. (p52)

The proof that I'm recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic. (p45)

I'm not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality. (p43)

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? (p43)

beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. (p37)

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)

I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. (p29)

I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)

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)

“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)