406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

She clutched him tightly, in alarm. She protected herself trembling. Because life was in peril. She loved the world, loved what had been created – she loved with nausea.

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

There are those who have. And there are those who have not. It’s very simple: the girl had not. Hadn’t what? Simply this: she had not. If you get my meaning that’s fine. If you don’t, it’s still fine.

But I’ve never known what to do with people and the things I like, sometimes they weigh me down, ever since I was a girl.

Como se explica que o meu maior medo seja exatamente o de ir vivendo o que for sendo?

I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret – that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what’s behind thought?

And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was “becoming”. Wasn’t it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?

That not-knowing might seem awful but it’s not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you’re born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if she’d learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it’s everyone’s moment of glory and it’s when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.

At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.