Clarice Lispector

Brazil
10 Dec 1920 // 9 Dec 1977
Writer

Quotes

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I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me.

A Breath of Life
The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn't be afraid. If we are the world, we are moved by a delicate radar that guides.
Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.

A Breath of Life
Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.

A Breath of Life
I write very simple and very naked. That's why it wounds. I'm a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.

A Breath of Life
To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.

The Hour of the Star
Reality doesn't surprise me. But that's not true: I suddenly feel such a hunger for the "thing to really happen" that I cry out and bite into reality with my lacerating teeth. And afterwards give a sigh over the captive whose flesh I ate. And again, for a long while, I do without real reality and find comfort in living from my imagination.

A Breath of Life
I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

A Breath of Life
You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.

The Stream Of Life
Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.

The Hour of the Star
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays