The Hour of the Star Quotes

“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, A Hora da Estrela

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“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, A Hora da Estrela

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Who hasn't asked himself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I am only true when I’m alone.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“But don't forget, in the meantime, that this is the season for strawberries. Yes.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling,”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“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.
Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Ela acreditava em anjo e, porque acreditava, eles existiam" | "She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“For one has the right to shout.
So, I am shouting.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She was incompetent. Incompetent for life. She had never figured out how to figure things out. She was only vaguely beginning to know the kind of absence she had of herself inside her.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She had no idea how to cope with life and she was only vaguely aware of her own inner emptiness. Were she capable of explaining herself, she might well confide: the world stands outside me. I stand outside myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“And 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.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“To eat communion bread will be to taste the world's indifference, and to immerse myself in nothingness.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why is there so much God? At the expense of men.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Actually even the worst childhood is always enchanted, how awful.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is a moist fog.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She knew what desire was — though she didn’t know she knew. It was like this: she was starving but not for food, it was a kind of painful taste that rose from the pit of her stomach and made her nipples quiver and her arms empty without an embrace.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“I cannot stand repetition: routine divides me from potential novelties within my reach.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“For at the hour of death you became a celebrated film star, it is a moment of glory for everyone, when the choral music scales the top notes.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“She had what's known as inner life and didn't know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams. These dreams, because of all that interiority, were empty because they lacked the essential nucelus of⁠—of ecstasy, let's say. Most of the time she had without realizing it the void that fills the souls of the saints. Was she a saint? So it seems. She didn't know what she was meditating because she didn't know what the word meant. But it seems to me that her life was a long meditation on the nothing. Except she needed others in order to believe in herself, otherwise she'd get lost in the successive and round emptiness inside her. She meditated while she was typing and that's why she made even more mistakes.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Why don’t clouds fall, since everything else does? Because gravity is less than the strength of the air that keeps them up there. Clever, right? Yes, but one day they fall as rain. That is my revenge.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star