Clarice Lispector Quotes

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?

You worry that we're becoming monsters. Merlin, we already were monsters. You didn't make us any worse.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster. -Merry

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

I'll be me, but I don't like it.

I am not a man. I am not a human being inside. I am not that. I don't know what I am, but I am not that.

There's a constant struggle between my ears about who I am and what I mean to the world.

I think that when you're exploring themes of humanity and what defines a hero and what makes us our best self and what makes us our worst self, you're going to stumble into territories of societal issues and that kind of thing. Sometimes you have accidents where you're not trying, but then the opportunity just presents itself. and you lean into it.

I may be the wrong person for my life.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

There are periods where you think, "What am I doing?" or "What am I doing it for?"; that's a more scary question. "I've made s---loads of money, I've left my mark in music, why am I still doing this?," and it takes a while to answer that question.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed-and still seems-to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress.

One cannot distinguish between human and non-human acts. One cannot point, one cannot say this man here is a man and that man there is a devil.

Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see. I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go".

I describe myself as a human being.

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.