Clarice Lispector

“Reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

“Facts and particulars annoy me.”

“I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.”

“But she didn’t 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.”

“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 - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.”

“Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.”

“Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.”

“Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.”

“I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery.”

“It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.”

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

“And one of the things I learned is that one should live in spite of. Although, one should eat. Although, one should love. Although, it must die. Even it is often the same even though it pushes us forward. It was despite the fact that it gave me an unhappy anguish that was the creator of my own life.”

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

“במרכז ספריה עומדים העולם הפנימי של הגיבורים והכתיבה עצמה; העלילות משניות.”

“לאהוב זו הגאולה היחידה שאני מכירה.”

“סטרה עוד שתי סטירות בפרצוף. כדי להיתקל בעצמה. וזה באמת קרה. במראָה ראתה סופסוף פרצוף אנושי, עצוב, עדין.”

“זו היתה ממלכת ה'כאן והעכשיו'. היא שאלה אותו: 'מתי תבוא שוב?'”

“היא חששה שזה ייגמר. כאילו נכה זרק לפתע את המקל שלו לאוויר.”

“איש מעולם לא נגע בשדיהּ.”

“עד ליום המחרת הפכתי להיות התגלמות הציפייה לחדווה: לא חייתי, צפתי בעצלתיים בים ענוג, נישאת אנה ואנה על פני הגלים. למחרת הלכתי לביתה, ממש רצתי.”