Clarice Lispector Quotes

Love? I wanted to go with him, to be on the stronger side, for him to spare me, like one who seeks shelter in the arms of the enemy to stay far from his arrows. It was different than love, I was finding out: I wanted him as a thirsty person desires water, without feelings, without even wanting to be happy.

- How does it feel to have a daughter?- At times it's like holding a warm egg in my hand.

It’s hard for me to believe that I will die. Because I’m bubbling in a frigid freshness. My life is going to be very long because each instant is. The impression is that I’m still to be born and I can’t quite manage it.

Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are.

Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?

Inside her it was as if death didn’t exist, as if love could weld her, as if eternity were renewal.

The steel suddenly touched her heart. Ah, jealousy, it was jealousy, the cold hand mashing her slowly, squeezing her, diminishing her soul.

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go 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. - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.