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Clarice Lispector

121 quotes

“What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance. (p27)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. (p29)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void. (p36)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. (p37)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? (p43)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality. (p43)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The proof that I'm recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic. (p45)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. (p52)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart. (p100)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself (p109)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. (p144)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith. (p141)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The struggle to reach reality-that's the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision-the way of seeing, the viewpoint-alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man's way of looking constructs it too. The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge-this is so clear to me. Tradition, the past of a culture-what is that besides a way of seeing that is handed down to us?”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1970 letter originally published in Jornal do Brasil, included at end of the English translation of The Besieged City
“The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo. Then, silence. The bright stain of sunlight lengthens little by little over the lawn. It goes climbing up the red wall of the house, making the ivy glisten in a thousand dewy lights. It finds an opening, the window. It penetrates. And suddenly takes possession of the room, slipping past the light curtains standing guard. Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude. The heat of the sun and its brightness fill the room. Luisa blinks. She frowns. Purses her lips. Opens her eyes, finally, and leaves them fixed on the ceiling. Little by little the day enters her body.”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She'd be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She'd never know how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic-it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one. The two of them were leaning over the fragile bridge and Virgínia was feeling her bare feet falter insecurely as if they were dangling atop the calm whirl of the waters. It was a violent and dry day, in broad fixed colors; the trees were creaking beneath the warm wind wrinkled by swift cool drafts. The thin and torn girlish dress was pierced by shivers of coolness. With her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge, Virginia was plunging her distracted eyes into the waters. Suddenly she'd frozen tense and light: "Look!”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don't know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience. I don't know what to do with it, I'm terrified of that profound disorganization. I'm not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn't know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It's that something that I'd like to call disorganization, and then I'd have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don't want to ground myself in what I experienced-in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don't have the capacity for another one. (beginning)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By not being, I was. To the edge of what I wasn’t, I was. What I am not, I am. Everything will be within me, if I am not; for “I ” is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms. My life doesn’t have a merely human sense, it is much greater — it is so much greater that, in relation to human sense, it is senseless. Of the general organization that was greater than I , I had till now perceived only the fragments. But now I was much less than human . . . and I would realize my specifically human destiny only if I gave myself over, just as I was doing, to what was not me, to what was still inhuman. (p172-3)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's with such intense joy. It's such an hallelujah. "Hallelujah," I shout, an hallelujah that fuses with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but is a shout of diabolical happiness. Because nobody holds me back anymore. I still have the ability to reason-I've studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason-but now I want plasma, I want to feed directly from the placenta. I'm a little frightened, still afraid to give myself over since the next instant is the unknown. Do I make the coming instant? Or does it make itself? We make it together with our breathing. And with the ease of a bullfighter in the ring. Let me tell you... I'm trying to capture the fourth dimension of the now-instant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer. Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing's is. Those instants that elapse in the air I breathe: in fireworks exploding silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. Only in the act of love — by the clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels — do we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crvstalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself: in love, the instant, an impersonal jewel, glitters in the air, a strange bodily glory, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds—and what one feels is at the same time immaterial and so objective that it happens as if it were outside the body, sparkling on high, happiness, happiness is the matter of time and the instant par excellence. And in the instant resides its own is. I want to capture my is. And I sing an hallelujah to the air, just as a bird does. And my song is no one’s. But there’s no passion suffered in pain and in love that’s not followed by an hallelujah.”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I write you completely whole and I feel a pleasure in being and my pleasure of you is abstract, like the instant. And it’s with my entire body that I paint my pictures and on the canvas fix the incorporeal — me, body-to-body with myself. One doesn’t understand music, one hears it. Hear me, then, with your whole body. When you come to read me you’ll ask why I don’t stick to painting and exhibiting my pictures, since my writing is coarse and orderless. It’s just that now I feel the need for words — and what I write is new to me because my true word has remained untouched until now. The word is my fourth dimension. (p4-5)”
Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) said by 1977 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source