Since God doesn't have a name, I'll give him the name of Simptar. It doesn't come from any language. I give myself the name Kampala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.

— Clarice Lispector

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

— Clarice Lispector

Suddenly I've become so restless that I'm capable of saying "That is enough" and ending what I'm writing you, which is based mostly on blind words.

— Clarice Lispector

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices.

— Clarice Lispector

There are indestructible things that accompany the body to death as if they had been born with it. And one of them is what is created between a man and a woman who have experienced certain moments together.

— Clarice Lispector

There is something here that frightens me. When I figure out what it is that frightens me, I shall also know what I love here. Fear has always guided me toward what I desire. And because I desire, I fear. Often it was fear that took me by the hand and led me. Fear leads me to danger. And everything I love is risky.

— Clarice Lispector

There were two ways of looking at it: imagining that it was far away and big, in the first place; in the second, that it was small and near. But at any rate, a stupid, hard, brown mountain. How she hated nature sometimes.

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

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

— Clarice Lispector

What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.

— Clarice Lispector