Clarice Lispector

“השיגעון הוא שכנו של ההיגיון האכזר ביותר.”

“לא לרצות, זו לעתים קרובות צורתו הנואשת ביותר של הרצון.”

“הוא ידע מניסיונו כי מי שנכשל מאיים על הזולת.”

“אנשים מפחדים מאוד מן האמת של זולתם.”

“החרדה מהווה לעתים קרובות ביטוי של שמחה.”

“כל מה שאין אנו מבינים בא על פתרונו באמצעות האהבה.”

“לשעשע את הזולת, זו צורתו המרגשת ביותר של הקיום.”

“אחד האמצעים כדי להבין הוא למצוא את היפה.”

“להיות מרוצה זו צורה של אהבה.”

“It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.”

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

“When I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.”

“I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what's behind thought?”

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

“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.”

“I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.”

“there are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.”

“I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.”

“I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.”

“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 season for strawberries. Yes.”