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

— Clarice Lispector

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness.

— Clarice Lispector

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth?

— Clarice Lispector

It is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recognizable.

— Clarice Lispector

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.

— Clarice Lispector

It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitted to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.

— Clarice Lispector

It was darker, all she could see of him was a shadow. He was fading more and more, slipping through her hands, dead at the bottom of sleep.

— Clarice Lispector

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into "purity", our hands that are coarse and full of words.

— Clarice Lispector

I write, and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.

— Clarice Lispector

Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.

— Clarice Lispector