Clarice Lispector Quotes

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?

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

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.

Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage

Putting my hand in someone else’s has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don’t have courage, I dream.

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.

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

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

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.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting

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

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

I work only with lost and founds.

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

All 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 the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

A horse is freedom so indominable that it becomes useless to imprison it to serve man: it lets itself be domesticated, but with a simple, rebellious toss of the head-shaking its mane like an abundance of free-flowing hair-it shows that its inner nature is always wild, translucent and free.

Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy.