Clarice Lispector quotes:

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.

Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.

I, who called love my hope for love.

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.

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

Facts and particulars annoy me.

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?

For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.

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

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

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

I work only with lost and founds.

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.

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

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."

She felt like a dry branch, sticking out of the air. Brittle, covered in old bark. Maybe she was thirsty, but there was no water nearby. And above all the suffocating certainty that if a man were to embrace her at that moment she would feel not a soft sweetness in her nerves, but lime juice stinging them, her body like wood near fire, warped, crackling, dry.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.

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

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.

So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.

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

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

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.

And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me? Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.

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

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.

Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce- which is called passion.

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

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

Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace - call it passion.

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

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

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

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 excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.

Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.

Facts and particulars annoy me,

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.

Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.