I am blinded. I open my eyes wide and only see. But the secret - that I neither see nor feel. Could I be making here a true orgy of what's behind thought?

— Clarice Lispector

I am finding myself: it's deadly because only death concludes me. But I bear it until the end. I'll tell you a secret: life is deadly. I'll have to interrupt everything to tell you this: death is the impossible and intangible. Death is just future to such an extent that there are those who cannot bear it and commit suicide. It's as life said the following: and there simply was no following.

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

I can feel myself holding a child, thought Joanna. Sleep, my child, sleep, I tell you. The child is warm and I am sad.

— Clarice Lispector

I carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.

— Clarice Lispector

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.

— Clarice Lispector

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. Furthermore, I deepened myself, but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.

— Clarice Lispector

I just remembered a time when to warm up my spirit I prayed: movement is spirit. Prayer was a means of mutely and hidden from others reaching myself. When I prayed I achieved an emptiness of soul - and that emptiness is all I can ever have. Besides that, nothing. But the emptiness has the value and appearance of plenty. One way of getting is not looking, one way of having is not asking and only believing that the silence I believe to be inside me is the answer to my - to my mystery.

— Clarice Lispector