CLARICE LISPECTOR

Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.

Facts and particulars annoy me.

I write to save someone's life, probably my own

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.

Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace - call it passion.

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

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

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

Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession.

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

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Today at school I wrote an essay about Flag Day which was so beautiful, but ever so beautiful - for I even used words without really knowing what they meant.

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 write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them.

And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

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

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

For one has the right to shout. So, I am shouting.

At first she dreamed of sheep, of going to school, of cats drinking milk. Little by little she dreamed of blue sheep, of going to school in the middle of the woods, of cats drinking milk from golden saucers. And her dreams became increasingly dense and acquired colours that were difficult to dilute into words.

And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.

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.

How was she to tie herself to a man without permitting him to imprison her? And was there some means of acquiring things without those things possessing her?

Putting my hand in someone else’s has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don’t have courage, I dream.