Clarice Lispector

Brazil
10 Dec 1920 // 9 Dec 1977
Writer

Quotes

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I love you as much as if I were always bidding you farewell. When I'm too alone, I fasten rattles to my ankles and wrists. That way almost all my thoughts are externalized and return to me as replies.

A Breath of Life
I nourish myself with what's left over of me and it's very little. There is left over however a certain secret silence.

A Breath of Life
Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.

A Breath of Life
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
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
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
Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

A Breath of Life
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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