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Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector Quotes

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Famous Clarice Lispector Quotes

“It's always the same old pitfall: neither evil or the imagination. In the former, in the final center, the simple and adjectiveless feeling, blind as a rolling stone. In the imagination, for it alone has the power of evil, just the enlarged and transformed version: beneath it the impassive truth. You lie and stumble into the truth. Even in her freedom, when she chose cheerful new paths, she later recognized them. To be free was to carry on after all and there again was the beaten track. She would only see what was already inside her. Having lost the taste for imagining.”

“But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words.”

“Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author's need to thinking - he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the "everything". But "everything" is a quanitity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers adn where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling.”

“And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself.”

“It so happens that the primary though - as an act of thought - already has a form and is more easily transmitte to itself, or rather, to the very person who is thinking it; and that is why - because it has a form - it has a limited reach. Whereas the thought called "freedom" is free as an act of thought. It's so free that even to its thinker it seems to have no author.”