Women Authors

"Clarice Lispector has been, without doubt, one of the most original and extraordinary voices of Brazilian literature and of Latin American literature generally. Since her death, she has become a literary icon, not only in Latin America, but in Europe as well, especially thanks to the work of the feminist critic Helene Cixous. Lispector's literary presence has been reaffirmed in the last ten years, and not just because of her death, but rather because of her exquisitely sensirive prose."

"Braiding the words into schemes, breaths of life. With your hands, extended like a word that travels and burns like a word inhabited by birds and oaks that is how you are Clarice, all stretched out and beautiful."

"...danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life."

"He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith. (p141)"

"Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success. (p144)"

"I don't have anything to nourish me: I eat myself (p109)"

"...write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart. (p100)"

"Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart. (p52)"

"I'm not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality. (p43)"

"Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself? (p43)"

"beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes. (p37)"

"I only use reason as an anesthetic. But for life I’m a perennial promise of understanding my submerged world. Now that there are computers for almost every type of search for intellectual solutions—I therefore turn back to my rich interior nothing. And I scream: I feel, I suffer, I am happy, I am moved. Only my enigma interests me. More than anything, I search for myself in my great void. (p36)"

"I really like things I don't understand: when I read a thing I don't understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo. (p29)"

"I must live little by little, it's no good living everything at once. (p27)"

"What an effort I make to be myself. I struggle against a tide in a boat with just enough room for my two feet in a perilous and fragile balance. (p27)"

"“At this moment” is a rare thing because only sometimes do I step with both feet on the land of the present; usually one foot slides toward the past, the other slides toward the future. And I end up with nothing. (p25)"

"I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest. (p12)"

"What is written here...are the remains of a demolition of soul, they are lateral cuts of a reality that constantly escapes me. These fragments of book mean that I work in ruins. (p11)"

"I wonder: why does God demand our love? possible answer: so that we might love ourselves and in loving ourselves, forgive ourselves. And how we need forgiveness. Because life itself already comes muddled with error. (p10)"

"Life has no adjective. It's a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me on the end, to breathe. And sometimes to pant. And sometimes to gasp. Yes. But sometimes there is also the deep breath that finds the cold delicateness of my spirit, bound to my body for now. (p10)"

"I'm afraid to write. It's so dangerous. Anyone who's tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things - and the world is not on the surface, it's hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it's a terribly dangerous void: it's where I wring out blood. I'm a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others - Which? maybe I'll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well. (p5)"

"This is not a lament, it's the cry of a bird of prey. An iridescent and restless bird. The kiss upon the dead face. I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own. Life is a kind of madness that death makes. Long live the dead because we live in them."

"What’s natural is supernatural, too. Don’t think that it’s very far off. What’s natural is already a mystery."

"I want to know, what will that matter after I die? (Well, the main value it has is that your name will remain in Brazilian literature.) CL: You think it will? I don’t write for posterity."

"(You even said that your liberation would be being able not to write.) CL: Of course! Writing is a burden!"

"(You, as a person, in the context of the world today, do you feel like part of society, or do you feel solitary?) CL: Well, I have friends, friendships, but writing is a solitary act. Outside the act of writing, I get along with people. (So you don’t feel solitude?) CL: Sometimes, sometimes, even quite deeply. Alceu Amoroso Lima wrote something that’s been repeated a lot, that I was in a tragic solitude in Brazilian letters."

"I don’t know how to explain it, but prizes are outside of literature—by the way, “literature” is a hateful word—yes, they’re outside the act of writing. You receive it the way you receive a hug from a friend, with a certain pleasure. But it has nothing to do with—(It’s circumstantial?) CL: Yes."

"(You never felt a violent impact from a book?) CL: A bit, sometimes. I felt it with “Crime and Punishment,” by Dostoyevsky, which gave me a real fever. “Steppenwolf” turned me upside down."

"I am not a professional writer, because I write only when I want to."

"When I’m not working, I read a review, and it’s all fine. When I’m working, a review of my work interferes with my intimate life, so I stop writing in order to forget the review. Even the positive ones, since I take care to cultivate humility. So sometimes I even feel attacked by praise."

"I never know beforehand what I’m going to write. There are writers who start writing only when they have the book in their head. Not me. I just follow along, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up. Then I start understanding what I wanted."

"I don’t write as a catharsis, to get something off my chest. I never got anything off my chest in a book. That’s what friends are for. I want the thing itself."

"I don’t reread. It nauseates me. When it’s published, it’s like a dead book—I don’t want to hear anything more about it. And, when I read it, I think it’s weird, I think it’s bad, that’s why I don’t read it. I also don’t read the translations that they do of my books, in order not to get annoyed."

"(Between Ermelinda and Vitória, in “The Apple in the Dark,” which is more Clarice?) CL: Maybe Ermelinda, because she was fragile and scared. Vitória is a woman that I’m not. I’m Martim."

"what interests me is jotting things down. Putting it all together is a bore."

"Without yet realizing that, for me, form and meaning are one single thing. The phrase arrives already made."

"I was what I still am, a daring shy person. I’m shy, but I throw myself into things."

"when I learned to read and write, I devoured books, and I thought that they were like trees, like animals, something that is born. I didn’t know there was an author behind it all. Eventually, I discovered that that’s how it was, and I said, “I want that, too.”"

"I was born in Ukraine, but already fleeing. My parents stopped in a village that’s not even on the map, called Chechelnik, for me to be born, and came to Brazil, where I arrived when I was two months old. So calling me a foreigner is nonsense. I’m more Brazilian than Russian, obviously."

"Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human? (p7 Benjamin Moser translation)"

"even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury. (p61)"

"Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting (p17)"

"The truth is always some inner power without explanation. The more genuine part of my life is unrecognizable, extremely intimate and impossible to define. (p11)"

"Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Let no one be mistaken. I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing..."

"Sometimes she didn't think. Sometimes a person sat there being. She didn't have to do. Being was already doing. You could be slowly or a bit fast. (from "A partida do trem")"

"This thing is the most difficult for a person to understand. Keep trying. Don't get discouraged. It will seem obvious. But it is extremely difficult to know about it. For it involves time. (beginning of "O relatório da coisa")"

"Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object--that's where I'm going. (beginning of the story "É para lá que eu vou")"

"But I don’t know how to capture what takes place except by living each thing that now and at the instant happens to me and it’s not important what. I let the horse gallop free, fiery from pure, noble joy. I, who run nervously and only reality delimits me. And when the day comes to an end I hear the crickets and I become full of thousands of tiny, clamouring birds. And each thing that happens to me I live here, taking note of it. Because I want to feel in my inquiring hands the living and trembling of what is today. (p58)"

"I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever. (p55)"

"I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organise myself, I must disorganize myself internally. To experience that first and fleeting primary state of freedom. Of the freedom to err, fall and get up again. (p55)"