Quote collection
209 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force."
"We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion."
"Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us."
"I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement."
"Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain... It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see... That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed."
"You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have"
"I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits."
"I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet."
"People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be."
"Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough."
"Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king."
"At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before."
"I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own characterthe author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work."
"The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day."
"When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time."
"We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed."
"This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames."
"Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies."
"...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily."
"If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that."