406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

I’ve always liked putting things in their places. I think it’s my only true calling. By ordering things I create and understand at the same time... Ordering is finding the best form.

My life had been as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call one of them death. I had always been in life, it mattered little that it was not I properly speaking, not that thing that I customarily call “I.” I had always been in life.

Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage.

I don’t want beauty, I want identity.

When I surprise myself at the mirror I am not frightened because I think I am ugly or beautiful. It is because I discover I am of a different nature. After not having seen myself for a while I almost forget I am human, I forget my past and I am as free from end and awareness as something merely alive. I am also surprised, eyes open pale at the mirror, that there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent.

And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a person alone, all alone. Oh, needing doesn’t isolate a person, things need things: it’s enough to see a chick walking to see that its destiny will be what lack will make of it, its destiny is to join, like drops of mercury cling to other drops of mercury, even though, like all drops of mercury, it has a complete and rounded existence in itself.

Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.

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.

Pensar es un acto. Sentir es un hecho. Los dos juntos son yo que escribo lo que estoy escribiendo. Dios es el mundo. La verdad es siempre un contacto interior e inexplicable.