406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

It is curious that I can't say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can't say it. More than anything, I'm afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.

In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke the words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow.

Don't you remember you once told me: 'today's pain will be your joy tomorrow; there is nothing that escapes transfiguration.' Don't you remember? Maybe it wasn't exactly like that...

Do I not have a plot to my life? for I am unexpectedly fragmentary.

I am always remote from myself, I am unreachable to myself just as a star is unreachable to me. I contort myself to be able to touch the present time that surrounds me, but I remain remote in relation to this very instant itself. The future, God help me, is closer to me than the present instant.

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

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, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.

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