406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?

Obsessed with the desire to be happy I lost my life. I moved with the tension of a bow and arrow in an unreality of desires.

Understand me: I write you an onomatopoeia, convulsion of language.

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

I think we have to do forbidden things, otherwise we suffocate. But without feeling guilty and instead as an announcement that we are free.

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.

I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.

I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.

A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses – in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.