406 Quotes by Clarice Lispector

It’s not a story that leads the reader to philosophical thoughts. And it’s not a philosophical treatise that needs a story to convey them. Instead, it is a vivifying experience that leads a person to the most ambitious philosophical discoveries. An experience transformed into literary art, in which harmony and disorder are the price of the revelation. A.

The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn’t be afraid. If we are the world, we are moved by a delicate radar that guides.

Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.

Instead of obtaining myself by fleeing, I find myself forsaken, alone, tossed into a dimensionless cubicle, where light and shadow are quiet ghosts. In my interior I find the silence I seek. But in it I become so lost from any memory of a human being and of myself that I make this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. If I were to scream – already without lucidity I imagine – my voice would receive the same, indifferent echo of the walls of the earth.

And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.

If she was no longer herself that meant a loss that counted as a gain.

Saying meaningless words is my great freedom.

I feel happier with animals than with people. When I watch my horse cantering freely across the fields – I am tempted to put my head against his soft, vigorous neck and narrate the story of my life. When I stroke my dog on the head – I know that he doesn’t expect me to make sense or explain myself.

What I really do when I write you is follow myself, and I’m doing it right now: I’m following myself without knowing what it will lead me to. Sometimes following myself is so hard. Because of following something that’s still so nebulous. Sometimes I end up stopping.