Ah, so that must have been her mystery: she had discovered a trail into the forest. Surely that was where she went during her absences. Returning with her eyes filled with gentleness & ignorance, eyes made whole. An ignorance so vast that inside it all the world's wisdom could be contained & lost.

— Clarice Lispector

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of in communicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.

— Clarice Lispector

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.

— Clarice Lispector

And one of the things I learned is that one should live in spite of. Although, one should eat. Although, one should love. Although, it must die. Even it is often the same even though it pushes us forward. It was despite the fact that it gave me an unhappy anguish that was the creator of my own life.

— Clarice Lispector

And woman was mystery in itself, she discovered. There was in all of them a quality of raw material, something that might one day define itself but which was never realized, because its real essence was "becoming". Wasn't it precisely through this that the past was united with the future and with all times?

— Clarice Lispector

Arriving back home, I didn’t start to read it. I pretended I didn’t have it, in order to have, later, the shock of discovering it. I opened it hours later, had a few marvelous lines, closed it again, walked around the house, put it off even more by going to eat a piece of bread with butter, pretended I didn’t know where I had left it, found it, opened it for a few instants. Furthermore, I created the most false sense for that covert thing that was joy. Joy would always be covert for me.

— Clarice Lispector

A sentence which might bear in mind that our great struggle is that of fear, and that if a man has killed compulsively, it is because he was extremely frightened. Above all, a justice which might examine itself, & recognize that all of us, a living quagmire, founded in darkness, & for this reason not a man's evil should be cosigned to another man's evil: so that the latter may not shoot to kill without restraint or censure. A justice which will not forget that we are all dangerous, & that at the hour when the executing of justice kills, he is no longer protecting us or seeking to eliminate a criminal; he is committing his own crime, which he has been harboring for a considerable time. At the hour of killing a criminal-at that very moment, an innocent man is being put to death. No, no, I am not asking for the sublime, nor for the things which gradually become the words which help me to sleep peacefully. Those of us who take refuge in the abstract are a mixture of forgiveness & vague charity. What I want is something much harsher & much more difficult: I want the terrestrial.

— Clarice Lispector

Beatitude starts at the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author's need to thinking - he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the "everything". But "everything" is a quantity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true in commensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers ADN where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling.

— Clarice Lispector

Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

— Clarice Lispector

Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? Is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?

— Clarice Lispector