01c. 1948 ADI carry out sun rituals on the slopes of high mountains. But I am also taboo for myself, untouchable because forbidden.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
02c. 1948 ADIt is instead just the grace of a common person turning suddenly real because he is common and human and recoignizable.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
03c. 1948 ADShe felt the phrase “demand her rights” had lain inside her forever, waiting.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
04c. 1948 ADBut she didn’t want to rest! – Her blood ran through her more slowly, its pace domesticated, like a beast that had trained its steps to fit in its cage.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
05c. 1948 ADOne day we shall domesticate him into a human being & then I shall be able to sketch him. For this is what we have done with ourselves & with God. The little boy will assist his own domestication; he is diligent & cooperative. He cooperates without knowing that the assistance we expect of him is for his own self-sacrifice. Recently, he has had much practice. And so he will go on progressing until little by little -- because of essential goodness with which we achieve our salvation -- he will pass from actual time to daily time, from meditation to expression, from existence to life. Making the great sacrifice of not being mad. I am not mad out of solidarity with thousands of people who, in order to construct the possible, have also sacrificed the truth which would constitute madness.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
06c. 1948 ADWhen I think of what I already lived through it seems to me I was shedding my bodies along the paths.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
07c. 1948 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
08c. 1948 ADReality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it - and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognise. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But - I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what I could not achieve.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
09c. 1948 ADEla acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existedClarice Lispector / quote ↗
10c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1948 ADBeyond 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 / quote ↗
12c. 1948 ADWhat would a person say to himself in the madness of sincerity? But it would be salvation. Thought the terror of sincerity comes from the part of the shadows that connect me to the world and to the creating unconscious of the world. Today is a night with many stars in the sky. It stopped raining.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
13c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1948 ADWhen I suddenly see myself in the depths of the mirror, I take fright. I can scarcely believe that I have limits, that I am outlined and defined. I feel myself to be dispersed in the atmosphere, thinking inside other creatures, living inside things beyond myself. When I suddenly see myself in the mirror, I am not startled because I find myself ugly or beautiful. I discover, in fact, that I possess another quality. When I haven't looked at myself for some time, I almost forget that I am human, I tend to forget my past, and I find myself with the same deliverance from purpose and conscience as something that is barely alive. I am also surprised to find as I gaze into the pale mirror with open eyes that there is so much in me beyond what is known, so much that remains ever silent.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
15c. 1948 ADCould it be that the person who sees most, feels and suffers most?Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
16c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1948 ADWhat 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1948 ADThere 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1948 ADBefore 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1948 ADBut if I hope to understand in order to accept things - the act of surrender will never happen. I must take the plunge all at once, a plunge that includes comprehension and especially incomprehension. And who am I to dare to think? What I have to do is surrender. How is it done? I know however that only by walking do you know how to walk and - miracle - find yourself walking.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
21c. 1948 ADReality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought. . . . life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
22c. 1948 ADSince 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 Amptala. As far as I know no such name exists. Perhaps in a language earlier than Sanskrit, an it-language.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
23c. 1948 ADThe world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.Clarice Lispector / quote ↗
24c. 1948 ADI 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 / quote ↗
