Quotes from the work (novels, stories, journalism, correspondence) of Clarice Lispector, Brazilian writer. Music by J. S. Bach (St. Mathew Passion)

1. — Clarice Lispector
(1920-1977)

3. The novels of Clarice Lispector often make us think of the autobiography
of St. Teresa
— Le Monde, September 19, 1970

4. That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote
like Virginia Woolf
― Gregory Rabassa, translator of Latin American fiction

5. Clarice came from a mystery / and departed for another
― Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet

6. Glimpses
of a soul turned
inside out

7. Being born ruined my health

8. I write as if to save somebody’s life.
Probably my own life

9. I am sure that in the cradle my first wish was to belong

10. I did not decipher her. But neither did she decipher me

11. I was guilt from birth, she who was born with the mortal sin

12. As I well know, for they have told me themselves,
certain people think I am dangerous

13. Everything touches me — I see too much, I hear too much,
everything demands too much of me

14. I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself

15. My problems are those of a person with a sick soul and cannot be
understood by people, thank God, healthy

16. No human being ever gave me the feeling of being so completely
loved as I was loved without restrictions by that dog

17. Alongside my desire to defend my privacy, I have the intense desire
to confess in public and not to a priest

18. The solitude I always needed is at the same
time entirely unbearable

19. Though He is not human, He still sometimes
makes us divine

20. From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all my
vivacity and all my interest in things.
Have you seen the way a castrated bull turns
into an ox? That is what happened to me

21. John Pawson’s project
After all, profundity is not the only thing that exists.
The surface is a real aspect

22. Photo by Tessa Posthuma de Boer
Someone else told me that I move with the lassitude of a fifty-year-
old-woman... which can happen with someone who has made a pact
with everyone, and who forgot that the vital center of a person has
to be respected [January, 1947 – Clarice was 27]

23. There is no doubt I am more important as a mother than as a writer.
If I wasn’t a mother, I would be alone in the world

24. Ah! It was easier to be a saint than a person!

25. Respect even the bad parts of yourself — respect above all the bad parts
of yourself — for the love of God, don’t try to make you perfect — don’t
copy an ideal, copy yourself — that is the only way to live

26. I wonder: If I look at the darkness with a lens, will I see more
than darkness?

27. If I had to give a title to my life it would be:
in search of the thing itself

28. Sometimes all the purity of body and soul is in illicit love, not blessed
by a priest, but blessed by the love itself

29. Photo by Aurelio Amendola
I feel anxiety, I’m afraid to be just one body. Little balls of mercury on the
broken thermometer — My fear and anxiety is of being one body

30. God has no name: He remains perfectly anonymous:
no tongue can pronounce his real name

31. The passage from life to death frightens me: it’s like passing from hate which
has an objective and is limited, to love which is limitless

32. My misfortune is asking questions, since I was little
I was nothing but a question

33. Magic is the fact that we invented God and that,
miraculously, He exists

34. Trying to put into sentences my most hidden and subtle sensation,
I would say : given the choice, I woul have been born a horse

35. And I — all that’s left to me is to bark at God

36. Quotes from
Why This World – A biography of Clarice Lispector
by Benjamin Moser
Published by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
2009
Music from
St. Matthew Passion
by J. S. Bach
All illustrations and photographs from internet
Clarice on screen
photo by
Adriana Paiva/Verve Comunicação