Quotes by Clarice Lispector

“There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she...”

“but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.”

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?”

“In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.”

“Where does music go when its not playing?she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”

“I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, its because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in ...”

“Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.”

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”

“And now -- now it only remains for me to light a cigarette and go home. Dear God, only now am I remembering that people die. Does that include me?Don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the sea...”

“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because be...”

“Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, e...”

“But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, fa...”

“It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - becaus...”

“Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author's need to thin...”

“And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an e...”

“She felt the phrase demand her rights had lain inside her forever, waiting.”

“But she didnt want to rest! Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.”

“One day we shall domesticate him into a human being & then I shall be able to sketch him. For this is what we have done with ourselves & with God. The little boy will assist his own domestication; ...”

“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 essenc...”

“When I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.”