Happy birthday, Clarice Lispector! Here are some quotes from the author:

“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.”

“What am I in this instant? I’m a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven’t been human for a long time. They wanted me to be an object. I am an object. An object dirty with blood. An object that creates other objects and the machine creates us all. It makes demands. Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don’t totally obey: if I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There’s something inside of me that hurts. Oh, how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears aren’t there in the machine that is me. I’m an object without a destiny. I’m an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of what’s inside the object behind the behind of the thought-feeling. I’m an urgent object.
Now—silence and slight amazement.”

“Never suffer because you don’t have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.”

“I read what I’d written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.”

“The word is my fourth dimension.”

“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’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.”

“In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke the words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow.”

“The words are pebbles rolling in the river.”

“I 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? orgy of words?”

“[F]or me, form and meaning are one single thing. The phrase arrives already made.”

“Humility in living isn’t my strong point. But when I write I’m fated to be humble. Though within limits. Because the day I lose my own importance inside me—all will be lost.”

“I just want to say that I write not for money but on impulse.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And it’s inside myself that I must create someone who will understand.”

“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.”

“I just know that I don’t want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don’t believe in myself because my thought is invented.”

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

“I work only with lost and founds.”

“I am so lost. But that is exactly how we live; lost in time and space.”

“I was looking for a way to pour some of myself out, before I completely overflowed.”

“If the twinkling of the stars pains me, if this distant communication is possible, it is because something almost like a star quivers within me.”

“Ah how much easier to to bear and understand pain than that promise of spring’s frigid and liquid joy.”

“Having just one life was so little.”

“Life has no adjective. It’s a mixture in a strange crucible but that allows me, in 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.”

“No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.”

“You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body.”

“Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”

“Coherence, I don’t want it any more. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder. I can only guess at it through a vehement incoherence.”

“Love is now, is always. All that is missing is the coup-de-grâce, which is called passion.”

“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.”

“Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage”

“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 have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.”

“Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.”

“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.”

“But I welcome the darkness where the two eyes of that soft panther glow. The darkness is my cultural broth. The enchanted darkness. I go on speaking to you, risking disconnection: I’m subterraneously unattainable because of what I know.”

“It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.”

“Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.”

“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”

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

“Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting.”

“[T]he continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.”

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”

“Who hasn’t asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”

“My life, the most truthful one, is unrecognizable, extremely interior, and there is no single word that gives it meaning.”

“I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.”

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

“I write very simple and very naked. That’s why it wounds. I’m a grey and blue landscape. I rise in a dry fountain and in the cold light.”

“How living hurt. Living was an open wound.”

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”

“But 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.”

“It is not easy to remember how and why I wrote a story or a novel. Once they detach from me, I too find them unfamiliar. It’s not a ‘trance,’ but the concentration during the writing seems to take away the awareness of whatever isn’t writing itself.”

“I have an affectionate fondness for the unfinished, the poorly made, whatever awkwardly attempts a little flight and falls clumsily to the ground.”

“Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.”

“Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go to seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence.”

“I don’t know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”

“Freedom isn’t enough. What I desire doesn’t have a name yet.”

“Was that, then, the way we do things? ‘Not knowing’— was that the way the most profound things happened? Would something always, always have to be apparently dead for the really living to happen? Had I had not to know that it was living? Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker?”

“That not-knowing might seem awful but it’s not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you’re born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if she’d learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it’s everyone’s moment of glory and it’s when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.”

“It’s only when we forget all our knowledge that we begin to know

“What I’m writing to you is not for reading—it’s for being.”

“By not being, I was. To the edge of what I wasn’t, I was. What I am not, I am. Everything will be within me, if I am not; for ‘I ‘ is merely one of the world’s instantaneous spasms. My life doesn’t have a merely human sense, it is much greater—it is so much greater that, in relation to human sense, it is senseless. Of the general organization that was greater than I, I had till now perceived only the fragments. But now I was much less than human…and I would realize my specifically human destiny only if I gave myself over, just as I was doing, to what was not me, to what was still inhuman.”

“There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.”

“I’m no more than a comma in life. I who am a colon. Thou, thou art my exclamation.”

“At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.”

“Here is a moment of extravagant beauty: I drink it liquid from the shells of my hands and almost all of it runs sparkling through my fingers: but beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.”

“Perhaps I have not been made for the pure, expansive waters, but for those which are small and readily accessible. And perhaps my craving for another source, which gives me the expression of someone in search of food, perhaps this craving is a whim—and nothing more. Yet surely those rare moments of self-confidence, of blind existence, of happiness as intense and serene as an organ playing—surely those moments prove that I am capable of fulfilling my quest and that this longing which consumes my whole being is not merely some whim? Moreover, that whim is the truth!”

“One of the most intense aspirations of the spirit is to dominate exterior reality through the spirit.”

“I find the greatest serenity in hallucination.”

“There are so many things in me besides what I know, so many things always silent. Why unspeaking?”

“Yet around her things were living so violently sometimes. The sun was fire, the earth solid and possible, plants were sprouting alive, trembling, whimsical, houses were made so that in them bodies could be sheltered, arms would wrap around waists, for every being and for every thing there was another being and another thing in a union that was a burning end with nothing beyond.”

“I keep looking, looking. Trying to understand. Trying to give what I have gone through to someone else, and I don’t know who, but I don’t want to be alone with that experience. I don’t know what to do with it, I’m terrified of that profound disorganization. I’m not sure I even believe in what happened to me. Did something happen, and did I, because I didn’t know how to experience it, end up experiencing something else instead? It’s that something that I’d like to call disorganization, and then I’d have the confidence to venture forth because I would know where to come back to: to the prior organization. I prefer to call it disorganization because I don’t want to ground myself in what I experienced—in that grounding I would lose the world as it was for me before, and I know that I don’t have the capacity for another one.”

“The greatest obstacle to my progress is me. I myself have been the biggest difficulty in my path. It’s with enormous effort that I’m able to overcome myself.”

“I’m an insurmountable mountain along my own path. But sometimes through a word of yours or a word I read, suddenly everything becomes clear.”

“There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.”

“But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man’s greatest sorrows.”

“Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that’s the ultimate thing you can give of yourself.”

“There it is, the sea, the most incomprehensible of non-human existences.”

“When the celebration was fast approaching, what could explain the inner tumult that came over me? As if the budding world were finally opening into a big scarlet rose.”

“Let me tell you. I’m trying to capture the fourth dimension of the now-instant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer. Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing’s is. Those instants that elapse in the air I breathe: in fireworks exploding silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by its very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees from me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. Only in the act of love—by the clear, starlike abstraction of what one feels—do we capture the unknown quality of the instant, which is hard and crvstalline and vibrant in the air, and life is that incalculable instant, greater than the event itself: in love, the instant, an impersonal jewel, glitters in the air, a strange bodily glory, matter sensitized by the shiver of seconds—and what one feels is at the same time immaterial and so objective that it happens as if it were outside the body, sparkling on high, happiness, happiness is the matter of time and the instant par excellence. And in the instant resides its own is. I want to capture my is. And I sing an hallelujah to the air, just as a bird does. And my song is no one’s. But there’s no passion suffered in pain and in love that’s not followed by an hallelujah.”

“I write you completely whole and I feel a pleasure in being and my pleasure of you is abstract, like the instant. And it’s with my entire body that I paint my pictures and on the canvas fix the incorporeal — me, body-to-body with myself. One doesn’t understand music, one hears it. Hear me, then, with your whole body. When you come to read me you’ll ask why I don’t stick to painting and exhibiting my pictures, since my writing is coarse and orderless. It’s just that now I feel the need for words—and what I write is new to me because my true word has remained untouched until now. The word is my fourth dimension.”

“I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.”

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

“As soon as you discover the truth it’s already gone: the moment passed. I ask: what is it? Reply: it’s not.”

“What beautiful music I hear deep within myself. It’s made of geometric lines crisscrossing in the air. It’s chamber music. Chamber music is melody-less. It’s a way of expressing silence. What I’m writing you is chamber music.”

“I walk on a tightrope up to the edge of my dream. Guts tortured by voluptuousness guide me, fury of impulses. Before I organize 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.”

“I, who manufacture the future like a diligent spider. And the best of me is when I know nothing and manufacture whatever.”

“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.”

“I’m in agony: I want the colorful, confused and mysterious mixture of nature. All the plants and algae, bacteria, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals concluding man with his secrets.”

“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, clamoring 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.”

“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.”

“‘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.”

“I must live little by little, it’s no good living everything at once.”

“I really like things I don’t understand: when I read a thing I don’t understand I feel a sweet and abysmal vertigo.”

“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.”

“Beauty is like that, it is a fraction of a second, quickness of a flash and then immediately it escapes.”

“Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?”

“I’m not a dreamer. I only daydream to attain reality.”

“The proof that I’m recovering my mental health, is that I get more permissive with every minute: I allow myself more freedom and more experiences. And I accept what happens by chance. I’m anxious for what I have yet to try. Greater psychic space. I’m happily crazier. And my ignorance grows. The difference between the insane and the not-insane person is that the latter doesn’t say or do the things he thinks. Will the police come for me? Come for me because I exist? Prison is payment for living your life: a beautiful word, organic, unruly, pleonastic, spermic, durabilic.”

“Suffering for a being deepens the heart within the heart.”

“Write with no strings attached. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.”

“I don’t have anything to nourish me: I eat myself.”

“I’m not a synonym—I’m a proper noun.”

“Let the author beware of popularity, otherwise he will be defeated by success.”

“He who emphasizes the ritual of faith can lose the point of faith.”

“I don’t know what my secret is. Tell me about yours, teach me about the secret of each one of us.”

“The night of today looks at me with torpor, verdigris, and lime. I want inside this night that is longer than life, I want, inside this night, life raw and bloody and full of saliva.”

“Once in a while, groundless melancholy would darken my face, a dull and incomprehensible nostalgia for times never experienced would invade me.”

“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.”

“Danger is what makes life precious. Death is the constant danger of life.”

“Death is an encounter with oneself.”