Quotes by Clarice Lispector

About Clarice Lispector:

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer who has been described as possibly the most important Jewish writer since Franz Kafka. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Não ter nascido bicho parece ser uma de minhas secretas nostalgias.

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector

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

Clarice Lispector

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides t...

Clarice Lispector

I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

Clarice Lispector

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

Clarice Lispector

Eu sempre disse a mim mesma que o amor que os outros têm pela gente cria mais deveres do que o amor que a gente tem pelos outros.

Clarice Lispector

(...) Porque se antes eu também queria enormemente estar no Brasil de um modo geral, agora fiquei indiferente quanto ao lugar onde viver - foi esse o resultado do isolamento na Suiça. Aprendi a não querer ninguém. Não era exatamente isso o que e...

Clarice Lispector

- How does it feel to have a daughter? - At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.

Clarice Lispector

I was first drawn to you thinking you were going to teach me something more than that. I needed that which I sensed in you and which you have always denied.

Clarice Lispector

Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.

Clarice Lispector

When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things b...

Clarice Lispector

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, ...

Clarice Lispector

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

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

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 ...

Clarice Lispector

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by someth...

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' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

Clarice Lispector

Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excu...

Clarice Lispector

Author Bio

  • NameClarice Lispector
  • DescriptionBrazilian writer
  • BornDecember 10, 1920
  • DiedDecember 9, 1977
  • CountryBrazil
  • ProfessionWriter; Screenwriter; Translator; Journalist; Novelist
  • AwardsPrêmio Jabuti