Clarice Lispector Quotes

If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

All my work is not personal - I've been trying to get away from that into the true self underneath all the tastes and things we think make up a self.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

I am not an image. I am a human being.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.

One forgets that one is one. I must try to remember this.

Man is but the place where I stand.

As a consumer of entertainment, as a director, I'm always interested in questions of identity and who someone is and how they're perceived and who they are versus who they thought they'd be.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

I don't feel I have an alter ego.

I can't stand outside myself and be anybody else.

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

I think I am one of those who can manage not to take on a completely different appearance under their own glance.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

It's so much easier to know who you are when there aren't a thousand people telling you who they think you are.

I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own.

Ego is to the true self what a flashlight is to a spotlight.

I dream, therefore I exist.

I've always been very conscious of who I am.