Clarice Lispector quotes

Clarice Lispector was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer and journalist, celebrated for her innovative and introspective literary style. Her works are known for their deep psychological insight and poetic language, exploring themes of identity, existence, and feminism. She is regarded as one of the most important figures in Brazilian literature and a pioneering voice in 20th-century fiction. Here are 49 of her quotes:

I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector

Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought.... life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.

Clarice Lispector

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

Clarice Lispector

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

Clarice Lispector

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector

Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.

Clarice Lispector

My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.

Clarice Lispector

No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.

Clarice Lispector

At first she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to school in the middle of the woods, of cats drinking milk from golden saucers. And her dreams became increasingly dense and acquired colours that were difficult to dilute into words.

Clarice Lispector

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

Clarice Lispector

Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.

Clarice Lispector

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

Clarice Lispector

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?

Clarice Lispector

I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.

Clarice Lispector

I write as if to save somebody's life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector

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.

Clarice Lispector

For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.

Clarice Lispector

I work only with lost and founds.

Clarice Lispector

Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed.

Clarice Lispector