Clarice Lispector Quotes

I don’t write as a catharsis, to get something off my chest. I never got anything off my chest in a book. That’s what friends are for. I want the thing itself.

I don’t reread. It nauseates me. When it’s published, it’s like a dead book—I don’t want to hear anything more about it. And, when I read it, I think it’s weird, I think it’s bad, that’s why I don’t read it. I also don’t read the translations that they do of my books, in order not to get annoyed.

(Between Ermelinda and Vitória, in “The Apple in the Dark,” which is more Clarice?) CL: Maybe Ermelinda, because she was fragile and scared. Vitória is a woman that I’m not. I’m Martim.

what interests me is jotting things down. Putting it all together is a bore.

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

I was what I still am, a daring shy person. I’m shy, but I throw myself into things.

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.”

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.

Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human? (p7 Benjamin Moser translation)

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)

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)

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.
So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing...

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)

I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth. (p14)

The two murmured more than talked: they had just started dating and were giddy, it was love. Love and what comes with it: jealousy. (beginning of "O primeiro beijo" )