The 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

Categorized in : Choices Destiny Fate

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.

Clarice Lispector

saying-yes novelists life

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

Clarice Lispector

dove abyss made

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.

Clarice Lispector

sea lost

I do not know much. But there are certain advantages in not knowing. Like virgin territory, the mind is free of preconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.

Clarice Lispector

territory knowing mind

Do you know that hope sometimes consists only of a question without an answer?

Clarice Lispector

answers knows sometimes

Putting my hand in someone else’s has always been my definition of happiness. Before I fall asleep, often - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and go into the greater world - often, before I get up the courage to go into the vastness of sleep, I pretend that someone has my hand in theirs, and then I go, go to that enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even after that I don’t have courage, I dream.

Clarice Lispector

struggle dream fall

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort

Clarice Lispector

simplicity effort achieve

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Clarice Lispector

persons monsters mean

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

Clarice Lispector

sincerely truth-is wells

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

Clarice Lispector

existence humans sea

Do you ever suddenly find it strange to be yourself?

Clarice Lispector

being-yourself strange

Living isn't courage, knowing that you're living, that's courage

Clarice Lispector

knowing

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

Clarice Lispector

rocks steel writing

All 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 the prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began.

Clarice Lispector

simplicity effort mistake

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Clarice Lispector

feels facts thinking

Her curiosity instructed her more than the answers she was given.

Clarice Lispector

given curiosity answers

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

Clarice Lispector

rotting becoming mature

Love is so much more deadly than I had thought, love is so much inherent as the very lack, and we are guaranteed by a need to be renewed continuously. Love is now, is forever. There is just the blow of grace - call it passion.

Clarice Lispector

passion blow love-is

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.

Clarice Lispector

self writing pigs

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.

Clarice Lispector

humans made want