Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector; December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist and a translator. A legendary figure in Brazil, renowned for her uncommon and unique writing style, her great personal beauty — the American translator Gregory Rabassa recalled being "flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," — and her eccentric personality.

Quotes

It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story or a novel. Once they detach from me, I too find them unfamiliar. It's not a "trance," but the concentration during the writing seems to take away the awareness of whatever isn't writing itself.
- This text appears in the "Back of the Drawer" section of The Foreign Legion (1964)

I have an affectionate fondness for the unfinished, the poorly made, whatever awkwardly attempts a little flight and falls clumsily to the ground.
- "Back of the Drawer" section of The Foreign Legion

Traduzo, sim, mas fico cheia de mêdo de ler traduções que fazem de livros meus. Além de ter basntante enjôo de reler coisas minhas, fico também com mêdo do que o tradutor possa ter feito com um texto meu...
- I do translate, but I get filled with fear when reading translations of my books. Besides feeling quite nauseous when rereading my own work, I also become afraid of what the translator may have done to my text...
  - Traduzir procurando não trair, Jóia, page 158, May 1968.

The struggle to reach reality-that's the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision-the way of seeing, the viewpoint-alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man's way of looking constructs it too. The way of looking gives the appearance to reality. When I say that Lucrécia Neves constructs the city of São Geraldo and gives it a tradition, this is somehow clear to me. When I say that, at that time of a city being born, each gaze was making new extensions, new realities emerge-this is so clear to me. Tradition, the past of a culture-what is that besides a way of seeing that is handed down to us?
- 1970 letter originally published in Jornal do Brasil, included at end of the English translation of The Besieged City

One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit. Lucrécia doesn't manage to do this--so she "clings" to that reality, takes as her own life the wider life of the world.
- 1970 letter originally published in Jornal do Brasil

It's not apparent to me that all these intimate movements of the book, as well as others that complement them-were drowned by what you call the "spell of the phrase." Ever since my first book, moreover, there's been talk about my "phrases." Do not doubt, however, that I wanted - and reached, by God - some thing through them, and not the phrases themselves.
- 1970 letter originally published in Jornal do Brasil

I just want to say that I write not for money but on impulse.
- "Explanation" in A via crucis do corpo (1974)

I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space.
- from "Brasilia" in Visão do esplendor (1975), translated into English by Katrina Dodson as "Vision of Splendor" in Complete stories (2015)

First Stories

English language translations by Katrina Dodson collected in Complete stories (2015)

The clock strikes nine. A loud, sonorous peal, followed by gentle chiming, an echo. Then, silence. The bright stain of sunlight lengthens little by little over the lawn. It goes climbing up the red wall of the house, making the ivy glisten in a thousand dewy lights. It finds an opening, the window. It penetrates. And suddenly takes possession of the room, slipping past the light curtains standing guard.
Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude. The heat of the sun and its brightness fill the room. Luisa blinks. She frowns. Purses her lips. Opens her eyes, finally, and leaves them fixed on the ceiling. Little by little the day enters her body.
- beginning of "O triunfo"

I have been sculpted into so many statues and haven't frozen in place ("Obsession")

He was sad and tall. He never spoke to me without making it understood that his gravest flaw lay in his tendency toward destruction. And that was why, he'd say, stroking his black hair as if stroking the soft, hot fur of a kitten, that was why his life amounted to a pile of shards: some shiny, others clouded, some cheerful, others like a "piece of a wasted hour," meaningless, some red and full, others white, but already shattered. (beginning of "História interrompida")

Really nothing happened on that gray afternoon in April. Everything, however, foretold a big day. (beginning of "Trecho")

Twelve years weigh on a person like pounds of lead. The days melt into one another, merge to form one whole block, a big anchor. And the person is lost. ("A fuga")

She sat down in a way that made her own weight "iron" her wrinkled skirt. She smoothed her hair, her blouse. Now, all she could do was wait. (beginning of "Gertrudes pede um conselho")

Today is Sunday and the city is lovely. There is no one on the streets and all the trees exist solitary and sovereign. The worries and desires and hatreds have dwindled, stretched out upon the earth, tired of existing. And at the level of my mouth all I find is the sweet, pure air of calm renunciation. (from "Cartas a Hermengardo")

I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed (from "Another Couple of Drinks")

Perto do coração selvagem (1943)

translated from the Portuguese into English as Near to the Wild Heart, by Giovanni Pontiero (1990) and Alison Entrekin (2012). Quotes are from Alison Entrekin's translation unless otherwise noted

There were many good feelings. Climbing the hill, stopping at the top and, without looking, feeling the ground covered behind her, the farm in the distance. The wind ruffling her clothes, her hair. Her arms free, heart closing and opening wildly, but her face bright and serene under the sun. And knowing above all that the earth beneath her feet was so deep and so secret that she need not fear the invasion of understanding dissolving its mystery. This feeling had a quality of glory. (p36)

If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me. (p59)

there are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent. Why unspeaking? (p60)

Freedom isn't enough. What I desire doesn't have a name yet. (p61)

She feared the days, one after another, without surprises, of pure devotion to a man. To a man who would freely use of all of his wife’s forces for his own bonfire, in a serene, unconscious sacrifice of everything that wasn’t his own personality. (p80)

...jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul. (p135)

The words are pebbles rolling in the river. (p179)

O Lustre (1946)

novel written in Portuguese. Translated into English as The Chandelier by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards (2018)

She'd be flowing all her life. But what had dominated her edges and attracted them toward a center, what had illuminated her against the world and given her intimate power was the secret. She'd never know how to think of it in clear terms afraid to invade and dissolve its image. Yet it had formed in her interior a far-off and living nucleus and had never lost the magic-it sustained her in her unsolvable vagueness like the single reality that for her should always be the lost one. The two of them were leaning over the fragile bridge and Virgínia was feeling her bare feet falter insecurely as if they were dangling atop the calm whirl of the waters. It was a violent and dry day, in broad fixed colors; the trees were creaking beneath the warm wind wrinkled by swift cool drafts. The thin and torn girlish dress was pierced by shivers of coolness. With her serious mouth pressed against the dead branch of the bridge, Virginia was plunging her distracted eyes into the waters. Suddenly she'd frozen tense and light:
"Look!"
- first page

Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond.

A cidade sitiada (1949)

Translated into English by Johnny Lorenz as The Besieged City (2019)

Courage however was deciding to start. As long as she didn't begin, the city was intact. And it would be enough to start looking to smash it into a thousand pieces that she could never put back together afterward.
It was a patience of constructing and demolishing and constructing again and knowing she might die one day right when she'd demolished in the process of building.
- 4: The Public Statue

Even error was a discovery. Erring would make her find the other face of objects and touch their dusty sides. (6: Sketch of the City)

There wasn't so much as a gesture that could express the new reality. (9: The Exposed Treasure)

He walked looking at the buildings in the rain, impersonal and omniscient again, blind in the blind city; but an animal knows its forest; and even if it gets lost - getting lost is a path too. (11: The First Deserters)

"Laços de família" (1960)

short story collection translated into English as "Family Ties"

Early in the morning it was always the same thing renewed: waking up. Which was languorous, unfurling vast. Vastly she'd open her eyes. (beginining of "Preciosidade")

It was one of those mornings that seem to hang in the air. And that are most akin to the idea we have of time. (beginining of "Começos de uma Fortuna")

A Maçã no escuro (1961)

Translated into English as The Apple in the Dark by Gregory Rabassa (1967) and by Benjamin Moser (2023). Quotes from Gregory Rabassa translation unless otherwise noted

I: How a Man is Made

This tale begins in March on a night as dark as night can get when a person is asleep. The peaceful way in which time was passing could be seen in the high passage of the moon across the sky. Then later on, much deeper into night, the moon too disappeared.
There was nothing now to distinguish Martim's sleep from the slow and moonless garden. When a man slept so deeply, he came to be the same as that tree standing over there or the hop of a toad in the darkness.
- beginning of Chapter 1

Sitting there in his plot he was enjoying his own vast emptiness. That way of not understanding was the primeval mystery and he was an inextricable part of it. (chapter 6)

As for Martim, he had time. In fact, he seemed to have discovered time. (Chapter 10)

That was how that man was growing, the way a rolling thing takes on volume. He was growing calmly, emptily, indirectly, patiently advancing. (chapter 10)

II: The Birth of the Hero

In the last analysis a man is measured by his hunger; there is no other way of figuring things out. (chapter 1)

Repetition seemed essential to him. Every time it was repeated, something seemed to have been added. So much so that Martim was already starting to get upset-he was a man, but something worrisome remained: what does a man do? (chapter 1)

To the point at which, that afternoon up on the hill, Martim began to judge himself. The unpleasant time for explanations had arrived. (Chapter 2)

Growth is full of tricks and self-derision and fraud; only a few people have the requisite dishonesty not to become nauseated. With the fierceness of self-preservation Martim could no longer permit himself the luxury of decency or interrupt himself with sincerity. (chapter 3)

A paixão segundo G.H. (1964)

Translated into English as The Passion According to G.H. by Ronald Sousa (1988) and Idra Novey (2012). Quotes from Ronald Sousa's translation unless otherwise noted

To Potential Readers: This is a book just like any other book. But I would be happy if it were read only by people whose outlook is fully formed. People who know that an approach-to anything whatsoever-must be carried out gradually and laboriously, that it must traverse even the very opposite of what is being approached. They and they alone will, slowly, come to understand that this book exacts nothing of anyone. Over time, the character G. H. came to give me, for example, a very difficult pleasure; but it is called pleasure.

I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don't know who, but I don't want to be alone with that experience. I don't know what to do with it, I'm terrified of that profound disorganization. I'm not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn't know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It's that something that I'd like to call disorganization, and then I'd have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don't want to ground myself in what I experienced-in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don't have the capacity for another one. (beginning)

...I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me. But while I was held down, was I happy? Or was there — and there was — an uncanny, restless something in my happy prison routine. Or was there - and there was - that trobbing something to which I was so accustomed that I thought throbbing was the same as being a person? Isn't that it? yes, that too...that too... (p5)

Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage (p16)

The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. (p90)

It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of. (p139)

Was that, then, the way we do things? "Not knowing"— was that the way the most profound things happened? would something always, always have to be apparently dead for the really living to happen? had I had not to know that it was living? Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker? (p159)

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. (p169)

By not being, I was. To the edge of what I wasn’t, I was. What I am not, I am. Everything will be within me, if I am not; for “I ” is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms. My life doesn’t have a merely human sense, it is much greater — it is so much greater that, in relation to human sense, it is senseless. Of the general organization that was greater than I , I had till now perceived only the fragments. But now I was much less than human . . . and I would realize my specifically human destiny only if I gave myself over, just as I was doing, to what was not me, to what was still inhuman. (p172-3)

A legião estrangeira (1964)

short story collection translated into English by Katrina Dodson as The Foreign Legion

As for my Saturday-swaying outside the window in acacias and shadows-I preferred, instead of squandering it, to grasp it in my tight fist, where I crumpled it like a handkerchief. ("The Sharing of Loaves")

It was a simple situation, a fact to mention and forget.
But if you're imprudent enough to linger an instant longer than you should, a foot sinks in and you're involved. From the instant we venture into it, it's no longer one more fact to tell, we begin to lack the words that would not betray it. At that point, we're in too deep, the fact is no longer a fact and becomes merely its dispersed repercussion. Which, if overly stunted, will one day explode as it did on this Sunday afternoon, when it hasn't rained for weeks and when, like today, beauty desiccated persists nonetheless as beauty.
- beginning of "Os obedientes"

This story could be called "The Statues." Another possible name is "The Murder." And also "How to Kill Cockroaches." So I will tell at least three stories, all true because they don't contradict each other. Though a single story, they would be a thousand and one, were I given a thousand and one nights. (beginnning of "A quinta história")

He was a being who chose. Among the thousand things he might have been, he had gone along choosing himself. In work for which he wore glasses, discerning whatever he could and using his damp hands to grope at whatever he couldn't see, the being kept choosing and therefore would indirectly choose himself. Bit by bit he had gathered himself into being. He kept separating, separating. (beginning of "Perfil de sêres eleitos")

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1968)

quotes from the translation from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler, 2021

…the greatest obstacle to my progress is me. I myself have been the biggest difficulty in my path. It’s with enormous effort that I’m able to overcome myself.

Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy. And with such modesty she was awaiting it: the poignancy of goodness.

There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.

we were only made for the little silence, not for the silence of the stars.

Humility in living isn’t my strong point. But when I write I’m fated to be humble. Though within limits. Because the day I lose my own importance inside me — all will be lost.

Remembering that day, which she saw again, she thought that from now on this was all she wanted from the God: to rest her chest on him, and not say a word.

Oh God! Having just one life was so little.

Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that's the ultimate thing you can give of yourself.

I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.

it's only when we forget all our knowledge that we begin to know

Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.

There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.

Felicidade clandestina (1971)

short story collection translated into English by Katrina Dodson as "Covert Joy"

There was beauty in that body that was neither ugly nor pretty, in that face in which a sweetness eager for greater sweetnesses was its sign of life. (from "A criada")

...when the celebration was fast approaching, what could explain the inner tumult that came over me? As if the budding world were finally opening into a big scarlet rose. (from "Restos do Carnaval")

I wasn't actually distracted, my guard was just down, I was being something quite rare: free. (from "Perdoando Deus")

The two murmured more than talked: they had just started dating and were giddy, it was love. Love and what comes with it: jealousy. (beginning of "O primeiro beijo" )

Agua viva (1973)

Translated into English in 1978 by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz as The Stream of Life; translated in 2012 by Stefan Tobler retaining original title. Quotes from Lowe and Fitz translation unless otherwise noted

It's with such intense joy. It's such an hallelujah. "Hallelujah," I shout, an hallelujah that fuses with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but is a shout of diabolical happiness. Because nobody holds me back anymore. I still have the ability to reason-I've studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason-but now I want plasma, I want to feed directly from the placenta. I'm a little frightened, still afraid to give myself over since the next instant is the unknown. Do I make the coming instant? Or does it make itself? We make it together with our breathing. And with the ease of a bullfighter in the ring.
Let me tell you... I'm trying to capture the fourth dimension of the now-instant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer. Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing's is. Those instants that elapse in the air I breathe: in fireworks exploding silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. Only in the act of love — by the clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels — do we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crvstalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself: in love, the instant, an impersonal jewel, glitters in the air, a strange bodily glory, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds—and what one feels is at the same time immaterial and so objective that it happens as if it were outside the body, sparkling on high, happiness, happiness is the matter of time and the instant par excellence. And in the instant resides its own is. I want to capture my is. And I sing an hallelujah to the air, just as a bird does. And my song is no one’s. But there’s no passion suffered in pain and in love that’s not followed by an hallelujah.
- beginning of book

I write you completely whole and I feel a pleasure in being and my pleasure of you is abstract, like the instant. And it’s with my entire body that I paint my pictures and on the canvas fix the incorporeal — me, body-to-body with myself. One doesn’t understand music, one hears it. Hear me, then, with your whole body. When you come to read me you’ll ask why I don’t stick to painting and exhibiting my pictures, since my writing is coarse and orderless. It’s just that now I feel the need for words — and what I write is new to me because my true word has remained untouched until now. The word is my fourth dimension. (p4-5)

I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth. (p14)

what beautiful music I hear deep within myself. It’s made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It’s chamber music. Chamber music is melody-less. It’s a way of expressing silence. What I’m writing you is chamber music. (p37)

I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again. (p55)

I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever. (p55)

But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today. (p58)

Onde estivestes de noite (1974)

collection of short stories, translated into English by Katrina Dodson as Where You Were at Night (2015)

Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object--that's where I'm going. (beginning of the story "É para lá que eu vou")

This thing is the most difficult for a person to understand. Keep trying. Don't get discouraged. It will seem obvious. But it is extremely difficult to know about it. For it involves time. (beginning of "O relatório da coisa")

Sometimes she didn't think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn't have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast. (from "A partida do trem")

A hora da estrela (1977)

Translated into English as The Hour of the Star by Giovanni Pontiero (1992) and Benjamin Moser (2011)

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.
Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.
So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing...
- p11

The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. (p11)

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting (p17)

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. (p61)

Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human? (p7 Benjamin Moser translation)

Interview (1977)

Translated into English by Benjamin Moser

I was born in Ukraine, but already fleeing. My parents stopped in a village that’s not even on the map, called Chechelnik, for me to be born, and came to Brazil, where I arrived when I was two months old. So calling me a foreigner is nonsense. I’m more Brazilian than Russian, obviously.

when I learned to read and write, I devoured books, and I thought that they were like trees, like animals, something that is born. I didn’t know there was an author behind it all. Eventually, I discovered that that’s how it was, and I said, “I want that, too.”

I was what I still am, a daring shy person. I’m shy, but I throw myself into things.

Without yet realizing that, for me, form and meaning are one single thing. The phrase arrives already made.

what interests me is jotting things down. Putting it all together is a bore.

(Between Ermelinda and Vitória, in “The Apple in the Dark,” which is more Clarice?) CL: Maybe Ermelinda, because she was fragile and scared. Vitória is a woman that I’m not. I’m Martim.

I don’t reread. It nauseates me. When it’s published, it’s like a dead book—I don’t want to hear anything more about it. And, when I read it, I think it’s weird, I think it’s bad, that’s why I don’t read it. I also don’t read the translations that they do of my books, in order not to get annoyed.

I don’t write as a catharsis, to get something off my chest. I never got anything off my chest in a book. That’s what friends are for. I want the thing itself.

I never know beforehand what I’m going to write. There are writers who start writing only when they have the book in their head. Not me. I just follow along, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up. Then I start understanding what I wanted.

When I’m not working, I read a review, and it’s all fine. When I’m working, a review of my work interferes with my intimate life, so I stop writing in order to forget the review. Even the positive ones, since I take care to cultivate humility. So sometimes I even feel attacked by praise.

I am not a professional writer, because I write only when I want to.

(You never felt a violent impact from a book?) CL: A bit, sometimes. I felt it with “Crime and Punishment,” by Dostoyevsky, which gave me a real fever. “Steppenwolf” turned me upside down.

I don’t know how to explain it, but prizes are outside of literature—by the way, “literature” is a hateful word—yes, they’re outside the act of writing. You receive it the way you receive a hug from a friend, with a certain pleasure. But it has nothing to do with—(It’s circumstantial?) CL: Yes.

(You, as a person, in the context of the world today, do you feel like part of society, or do you feel solitary?) CL: Well, I have friends, friendships, but writing is a solitary act. Outside the act of writing, I get along with people. (So you don’t feel solitude?) CL: Sometimes, sometimes, even quite deeply. Alceu Amoroso Lima wrote something that’s been repeated a lot, that I was in a tragic solitude in Brazilian letters.

(You even said that your liberation would be being able not to write.) CL: Of course! Writing is a burden!

I want to know, what will that matter after I die? (Well, the main value it has is that your name will remain in Brazilian literature.) CL: You think it will? I don’t write for posterity.

What’s natural is supernatural, too. Don’t think that it’s very far off. What’s natural is already a mystery.

Um Sopro de Vida (1978)

translated from the original Portuguese into English by Johnny Lorenz as A Breath of Life (2012)

This is not a lament, it's the cry of a bird of prey. An iridescent and restless bird. The kiss upon the dead face.
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.
- first lines

I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well. (p5)

Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now. (p10)

I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error. (p10)

What is written here...are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me. These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins. (p11)

I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest. (p12)

“At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing. (p25)

What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance. (p27)

I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)

I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. (p29)

I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void. (p36)

beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. (p37)

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? (p43)

I'm not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality. (p43)

The proof that I'm recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn't say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic. (p45)

Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. (p52)

...write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart. (p100)

I don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself (p109)

Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. (p144)

He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith. (p141)

...danger is what makes life precious.
Death is the constant danger of life.
- p157

Quotes about Clarice Lispector

Braiding the
words into schemes,
breaths of life.
With your hands,
extended like a
word that travels and burns
like a word
inhabited by birds
and oaks
that is how you are Clarice, all stretched out and beautiful.
- Marjorie Agosín fragment of the poem "Clear Clarice" in Melodious Women, translated from the original Spanish by Monica Bruno Galmozzi

Clarice Lispector has been, without doubt, one of the most original and extraordinary voices of Brazilian literature and of Latin American literature generally. Since her death, she has become a literary icon, not only in Latin America, but in Europe as well, especially thanks to the work of the feminist critic Helene Cixous. Lispector's literary presence has been reaffirmed in the last ten years, and not just because of her death, but rather because of her exquisitely sensirive prose.
- Marjorie Agosín Introduction to Passion, Memory and Identity: Twentieth-Century Latin American Jewish Women Writers

What remains constant is the intimate physicality of Clarice's voice-its strong rhythms and the way she seems to be whispering in your ear like a sister, mother, and lover, somehow touching you from far away. Part of her rhythm comes from a fondness for repetition: refrains that produce an incantatory feel or thematic crescendo, anaphoric structures that lend a biblical tone, the slapstick effect of a repeated catchphrase, or the compulsive reiterations of an obsessive mind, like Laura's in "The Imitation of the Rose." Her words hold onto a sensory coherence, even when their semantic logic threatens to come undone.
Clarice inspires big feelings. As with "the rare thing herself" from "The Smallest Woman in the World," those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can claim the key to her entirely, not even in the Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways.
- Katrina Dodson, from the Translator's Note to Complete Stories (2015)

Clarice lispector had a diamond-hard intelligence, a visionary instinct, and a sense of humor that veered from naif wonder to wicked comedy...She attempts to capture what it is to think our existence as we are in it-in the marvelous scandal, as Lispector puts it, of life. An astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it.
- Rachel Kushner used as blurb for Complete Stories (2015)

Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self’s light.
- Lorrie Moore used as blurb

Clarice Lispector spent the first two months of her life in the town of Chechelnik in Ukraine. This is a small, short fact. The interesting question, unanswered in the places I've looked for it, is: At what age did she enter the Portuguese language? And how much Russian did she bring with her? Any Yiddish? Sometimes I think this is what her work is about . . . one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there's hospitality, sometimes a quarrel
- Grace Paley "Language: on Clarice Lispector" (1989)

(There isn't a mean bone in the body of Lispector's work.) But there is sadness, aloneness (which is a little different than loneliness). Some of the characters try desperately to get out of the stories. Others retreat into their own fictions-seem to be waiting and relieved by Lispector's last embracing sentence. Lispector was lucky to have begun to think about all these lives (men's lives as well as women's) in the early years of the women's movement, that is, at a time when she found herself working among the scrabbly low tides of that movement in the ignorance which is often essential to later understanding. That historical fact is what has kept her language crooked and clean.
- Grace Paley "Language: on Clarice Lispector" (1989)

The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century.
- Parul Sehgal in review (2018)

Everything about Clarice Lispector was unlikely: her great beauty, her early fame, her unique voice, her status as an icon to Brazilians, her passions and masks, and her family history as the daughter of destitute Jews who barely escaped the murderous pogroms of their native Ukraine to settle in Recife. Perhaps as important to modern literature as Virginia Woolf.
- Judith Thurman used as blurb for Complete Stories (2015)

Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O'Brien, Borges, and Pessoa utterly original and brilliant. haunting and disturbing.
- Colm Tóibín used as blurb for Complete Stories (2015)

Women's place is unfortunately the place society will allow us to have, for the time being. There are very fine women writers such as Clarice Lispector, who was an extraordinary writer and should have been part of the Boom. She belonged to the same generation as Cabrera Infante, so why was she not included in the Boom? Because she was a woman.
- Luisa Valenzuela, Interviews with Latin American writers by Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier (1989)

“I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up,” states the female narrator of Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva (The Stream of Life) as she pursues a narrative quest of self-discovery only to realize that her identity is compound and words cannot always convey what she actually feels. If the apple symbolizes knowledge and the chair an aspect of domesticity, this voice is affirming that she is greater than her gender. Despite an intense struggle with words, Lispector’s female protagonists nevertheless burst forth, sparked by unexpected epiphanies that lead them to probe their existential condition with a self-conscious awareness of the limitations of language and of their beleaguered situations. These narrator/protagonists also manifest experiences of displacement and otherness that, rather than inducing alienation, expand the knowledge of self, as exemplified by the words of another female narrator, GH: “He who lives totally is living for others.” Lispector’s prose also transmits the evocative and spiritual sense of the ineffable, an openness to a form of mystical and linguistic reception that transcends the concreteness of the written word to enable her characters and readers to experience a lyrical sense of the sublime, the “unsayable,” which scholar and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man Is Not Alone (1951), recognized as “the root of man’s creative activities in art, thought and noble living.”
- Nelson H. Vieira, "Clarice Lispector" (2009)

Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce
- Edmund White used as blurb for Complete Stories (2015)

External links

Wikipedia

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Clarice Lispector