Quotation Study: Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector

On Lispector’s introspective dialogue with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Epicurus

This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!

These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.

There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.

This Week: Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice Lispector

This was my first Lispector, and I underlined so many lines the pages started to look bruised. I could easily write multiple pieces on this novel. On its themes, its fragmented beauty, its quiet one-liners that strike your brain with familiarity. But for today, I want to focus on the philosophical undercurrents that run just beneath the surface.

Lispector’s writing is pure stream of consciousness. It feels like stepping into someone’s thoughts mid-sentence. It’s messy and interior and completely alive.

I’ve always believed that simple language can do the heaviest lifting. Short, deliberate sentences have a way of hitting deeper. Lispector leans into this. Her elliptical style captures the way the mind really moves. Every full stop feels like a jolt.

And with this kind of writing, of course, comes philosophy. You can’t explore the inner self without brushing up against big questions. I pulled a few that stayed with me. Let’s linger on those for a moment.

“There is just an opportunity for reintegration and continuity. Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.”

Two philosophical traditions come to mind here: Aristotle and the atomists, particularly Epicurus.

Aristotle famously held that nothing comes from nothing. For him, everything has a cause, a mover, a source. The world isn’t born from emptiness but from substance already in motion. This principle lies at the heart of his metaphysics. The idea that change and existence are always rooted in something prior.

I think Lispector is playing with this very idea in the novel. It’s as if the protagonist is set on a path that isn’t entirely her own. She moves through the world reacting to invisible forces, ricocheting off emotions and events she doesn’t fully understand. Her actions often feel involuntary, shaped more by environment or instinct than deliberate choice. And yet, blame still lands on her, especially in the childhood sections of the novel, where responsibility is placed on her before she even knows what it means to choose.

In contrast, the atomists (Epicurus among them) imagined a world made up of indivisible particles moving through the void. For the Epicureans, everything that exists arises from the collision and combination of atoms. There’s no divine purpose or higher cause, only chance, movement, and matter. While they too rejected the idea of creation from nothing, their vision was more materialist, less teleological.

Both perspectives reject the idea of beginning from absolute nothingness—and I think Lispector does the same. Even the novel’s most dominant thoughts seem to arise from some kind of source, whether it's identifiable or not. Everything spills onto the page in chaotic bursts, yet somehow, everything also feels tethered to something else. It doesn’t make sense, and yet it does at the same time.

“And beneath all these uncertainties—the chromatic study—I know everything is perfect, because it followed its fated path regarding itself from scale to scale. Nothing escapes the perfection of things, that’s how it is with everything.”

I think there are echoes of Aristotle here too, but I find myself now more drawn to Plato, particularly his theory of Forms, which I also touched on in last week’s quotation study. We live amidst constant uncertainty, surrounded by objects and ideas whose meanings shift and blur. What is the real chair? What gives something its essence? Plato would argue that beyond this chaotic, ever-changing world lies a realm of perfect, unchanging Forms. The ideal versions of everything we encounter. And perhaps, in the face of all this instability, there’s a kind of comfort in that. The idea that beneath the flux, there is something stable, something pure. That even if we can’t fully access it, perfection exists somewhere underneath. It’s this that Lispector’s protagonist clutches into in the novel, it’s the driving force of her life and thus the narrative.

There is of course Descartes’ to be read here as well. The below quote also draws on that.

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

In his philosophy, Descartes famously begins by casting everything into doubt. He strips away all assumed knowledge, plunging himself into a radical state of skepticism. From this void emerges the foundational certainty: 'I think, therefore I am' or Cogito, ergo sum. Existence, for Descartes, is anchored in thought, in the act of doubting itself.

But in Lispector’s novels, her protagonist takes a different route through epistemic uncertainty. Rather than obsessively defining the self, she moves through life by simply acknowledging that she lives. That she breathes, walks, observes, eats and aches. Why waste the energy trying to pin down identity with precision? In the face of the unknowable, she finds grounding not in thought, but in being. In presence.

Often there is no philosophical theory that will answer your questions so it becomes not about resolving philosophical doubt but it’s about inhabiting it.

“But dreams are more complete than reality, which drowns me in the unconscious.”

As mentioned, this is a stream-of-consciousness novel, so it feels only fitting that it’s threaded with reflections on the unconscious, dreams, and reality. I found this line particularly potent. It neatly encapsulates the essence of the unconscious and the quiet power dreams can hold. Frustratingly we are limited in our waking life.

“I’m going to move everyone, I don’t nourish my errors, but may they all nourish me”

Finally, this line feels less philosophical and more ethical, but I wanted to include it because it’s a notion I’ve been reflecting on deeply over the past year. Mistakes (or just inconveniences) happen, often for reasons we might not fully understand, but we shouldn’t let them consume us or hold us back. Instead, we should use them as opportunities to grow, or as Lispector puts it, to nourish ourselves. Mistakes become stepping stones guiding us toward the next phase of our lives.

I think what all these quotes have in common and perhaps is the essence of Near to the Wild Heart is movement. Everything is in a constant flux. The mind never stops and neither does the world. It’s about finding stillness in the movement. I’ll end with this final quote that encapsulates this:

‘She stopped and without her footsteps she heard the silence moving.’

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