406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

Only then did she see that her life was miserable. She felt like crying when she saw her other side, she who, as I said, had always thought she was happy.

She wanted even more: to be reborn always, to sever everything that she had learned, that she had seen, and inaugurate herself in new terrain where every tiny act had a meaning, where the air was breathed as if for the first time.

Su cualidad era exactamente no tener cantidad, no ser mensurable ni divisible porque todo lo que se puede medir y dividir tiene un principio y un fin.

That night I’d already had quite a bit to drink. I wandered from bar to bar, until, excessively happy, I was afraid I’d outdo myself: I’d grown too comfortable in my own skin. I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed.

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?

To write, therefore, is the way of someone who uses the word as bait; the word fishes for something that is not a word. When that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be discarded with relief. But here the analogy ends: the non-word upon taking the bait, has assimilated it. Salvation, then, is to read ‘absent-minded’.

As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots of a rare tree, that’s how I write to you, and those roots as if they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires for fulfillment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and needs the approval of God: that is creation.

I’m so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.

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.