2. The novels of Clarice Lispector often make us think of the
autobiographyof St. Teresa Le Monde, September 19, 1970
3. That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and
wrotelike Virginia Woolf Gregory Rabassa, translator of Latin
American fiction
4. Clarice came from a mystery / and departed for another
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet
5. Glimpsesof a soul turnedinside out
6. Being born ruined my health
7. I write as if to save somebodys life.Probably my own
life
8. I am sure that in the cradle my first wish was to
belong
9. I did not decipher her. But neither did she decipher me
10. I was guilt from birth, she who was born with the mortal
sin
11. As I well know, for they have told me themselves,certain
people think I am dangerous
12. Everything touches me I see too much, I hear too much,
everything demands too much of me
13. I am so mysterious that I dont even understand myself
14. My problems are those of a person with a sick soul and
cannot beunderstood by people, thank God, healthy
15. No human being ever gave me the feeling of being so
completely loved as I was loved without restrictions by that
dog
16. Alongside my desire to defend my privacy, I have the
intense desire to confess in public and not to a priest
17. The solitude I always needed is at the sametime entirely
unbearable
18. Though He is not human, He still sometimes makes us
divine
19. From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all myvivacity
and all my interest in things. Have you seen the way a castrated
bull turns into an ox? That is what happened to me
20. John Pawsons projectAfter all, profundity is not the only
thing that exists. The surface is a real aspect
21. Photo by Tessa Posthuma de BoerSomeone else told me that I
move with the lassitude of a fifty-year-old-woman... which can
happen with someone who has made a pactwith everyone, and who
forgot that the vital center of a person hasto be respected
[January, 1947 Clarice was 27]
22. There is no doubt I am more important as a mother than as a
writer.If I wasnt a mother, I would be alone in the world
23. Ah! It was easier to be a saint than a person!
24. Respect even the bad parts of yourself respect above all
the bad partsof yourself for the love of God, dont try to make you
perfect dontcopy an ideal, copy yourself that is the only way to
live
25. I wonder: If I look at the darkness with a lens, will I see
morethan darkness?
26. If I had to give a title to my life it would be:in search
of the thing itself
27. Sometimes all the purity of body and soul is in illicit
love, not blessed by a priest, but blessed by the love itself
28. Photo by Aurelio AmendolaI feel anxiety, Im afraid to be
just one body. Little balls of mercury on the broken thermometer My
fear and anxiety is of being one body
29. God has no name: He remains perfectly anonymous: no tongue
can pronounce his real name
30. The passage from life to death frightens me: its like
passing from hate which has an objective and is limited, to love
which is limitless
31. My misfortune is asking questions, since I was little I was
nothing but a question
32. Magic is the fact that we invented God and
that,miraculously, He exists
33. Trying to put into sentences my most hidden and subtle
sensation,I would say : given the choice, I woul have been born a
horse
34. And I all thats left to me is to bark at God
35. Quotes fromWhy This World A biography of Clarice Lispector
by Benjamin MoserPublished by Oxford University Press Inc., New
York2009Music from St. Matthew Passion by J. S. Bach All
illustrations and photographs from internetClarice on screen photo
byAdriana Paiva/Verve Comunicao