406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

And so I realise that I want for myself the vibrant substratum of the word repeated in a Gregorian chant. I’m aware that everything I know I cannot say, I know only by paining or pronouncing syllables blind of meaning. And if here I have to use words for you, they must create an almost exclusively bodily meaning. I’m battling with the ultimate vibration. To tell you my substratum I make a sentence of words composed only of the now-instants.

When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

I was first drawn to you thinking you were going to teach me something more than that. I needed that which I sensed in you and which you have always denied.

I’ is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms.

Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.

I write in acrobatics and pirouettes in the air – I write because I so deeply want to speak.

I’m blinder than before. I did see, I really did. I was terrified by the raw truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that for me to admit that I am as alive as it is – and my most hideous discovery is that I am as alive as it is – I shall have to raise my consciousness of life outside to so high a point that it would amount to a crime against my personal life.

Truth is always an interior and inexplicable contact. My truest life is unrecognizable, extremely interior and there is not a single word that defines it. My heart has emptied itself of every desire and been reduced to its own final or primary beat.

Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.