Quotes by Peruvian Authors

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
Any path is only a path and there is no affront to oneself or to others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.
Carlos Castañeda
Without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace. The gift of grace increases as the struggles increase.
Saint Rose of Lima
All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.
Carlos Castañeda
Can you please tell me who you people are?""Criminals. Offenders. Monsters. We've all been imprisoned in Tartarus for discretions committed against the gods of Olympus."~ Hope/Daedalus, The River Styx
David Revilla
You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet." Rey smiled. "Can I be both?" "But you'd rather be a poet.""Who wouldn't?" he said.
Daniel Alarcón
You can not change the past but you can change the future.
Immortal Technique
Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.
Daniel Alarcón
Aviation in air, in water and in spirit. Its laws are different in all three cases. The spirit soars the more it weighs and sinks into itself. The heavier the spirit, the higher and farther it flies.
César Vallejo
The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.
César Vallejo
Mechanics is a means or discipline for the realization of life, but not life itself. It ought to carry us to life itself.
César Vallejo
The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art.
César Vallejo
For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.
Carlos Castañeda
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Our fellow men are black magicians. And whoever is with them is a black magician on the spot. Think for a moment, can you deviate from the path that your fellow men have lined up for you? And if you remain with them, your thoughts and your actions are fixed forever in their terms. That is slavery. The warrior, on the other hand, is free from all that. Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. So, fear your captors, your masters. Don't waste your time and your power fearing freedom.
Carlos Castenada
Man is saved if he opens himself to God and to others, even if he is not clearly aware that he is doing so. This is valid for Christians and non-Christians alike -- for all people. . . . We can no longer speak properly of a profane world. A qualitative and intensive approach replaces a quantitative and extensive one.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?
Mario Vargas Llosa
But there is one thing that is privileged to be a paradoxical sign of God, in relation to which men are able to manifest their deepest commitment -- our Neighbor. The sacrament of our Neighbor!' -- Congar
Gustavo Gutiérrez
[Neighbor is] not he whom I find in my path, but rather he in whose path I place myself, he whom I approach and actively seek.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
Mario Vargas Llosa
And what does he feel?""He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride.""Good," Henry said. "ANd where are you?""Backstage."Henry shook his head gravely. "THere's no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there's only the world it dramatizes. Now, where are you?""With my father, the president. In his chambers.""Right. With me. Your father. And now--this is important--do you love me?"Nelson considered this; or rather, Nelson, as Alejo, considered this."Yes," he said after a moment. "I do.""Good. Remember that. In every scene--even when you hate me, you also love me. That's why it hurts. Got it?"Nelson said that he did."Are you sure?""Yes.""Good. Because it does hurt," Henry said. "DOn't forget that. It's supposed to. Always.
Daniel Alarcón
That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.
Daniel Alarcón
If there is no friendship with them [the poor] and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Whether religious or racial, anti-Semitism is always repugnant, one of the most destructive manifestations of human stupidity and evil. What is profoundly expressed in it is man's traditional mistrust of the man who is not part of his tribe, that 'other' who speaks a different language, whose skin is a different color, and who participates in mysterious rites and rituals.
Mario Vargas Llosa
The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake
Mario Vargas Llosa
The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it.
Daniel Alarcón
The aim of sorcerers is to reach a state of total awareness in order to experience all the possibilities of perception available to man. This state of awareness even implies an alternative way of dying.
Carlos Castañeda
there was a time when this home was her domain. Sometimes she felt proud of it, sometimes she felt tied to it, but whether it was a burden or a blessing, it was hers to keep. She’d known better than anyone what this house needed; lately it’d become one of the few aspects of her life she could control. there is no corner, no ridge along the steps or crack along the wall, that she doesn’t know like her own body. the house may never have been the sanctuary she’d always dreamed of, but at least it carried no surprises. It was comfortable.
Natalia Sylvester
The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.
Daniel Alarcón
Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it.
Carlos Castañeda
We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castañeda
The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.
Carlos Castenada
The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.
Mario Vargas Llosa
There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth--hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic--he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating.
Daniel Alarcón
Oh, life, life!" Bastidas complained, sipping his drink. "What is life? A little flame at the tip of a candle, exposed to a strong wind.
Julio Ramón Ribeyro
You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
It is the case that, albeit to a lesser extent, all fictions make their readers live "the impossible", taking them out of themselves, breaking down barriers, and making them share, by identifying with the characters of the illusion, a life that is richer, more intense, or more abject and violent, or simply different from the one that they are confined to by the high-security prison that is real life. Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.
Mario Vargas Llosa
We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Sometimes I'll pick up the "heart of the jungle" fossil on my bookshelf, or pull out my old field notebooks from my desk drawer, warped by Amazonian rains and the river's steam, the scent of the jungle still on their pages. I do this to remind myself that fiction does not have a monopoly on the unbelievable.
Andrés Ruzo
Nothing is pending in the world…nothing is finished, yet nothing is unresolved…Everything is filled to the brim.
Carlos Castañeda
If you’re not carefulyou’ll end up believing this is the world
Antonio Cisneros
and this passion, like bad kerosene, barely burns.
César Vallejo
You wouldn’t believethe sun had ever shone on this heart.
Antonio Cisneros
What air is there left to breathe
Antonio Cisneros
the song of the deadheavy as rain on the wide banana leaveshard as drums
Antonio Cisneros
Man lives only to learn. And if he learns it is because it is the nature of his lot, for good or bad.
Carlos Castañeda
The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
Carlos Castañeda
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
Carlos Castañeda
‎Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.
Mario Vargas Llosa
From the cave to the skyscraper, from the club to weapons of mass destruction, from the tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have multiplied human experiences, preventing us from succumbing to lethargy, self-absorption, resignation. Nothing has sown so much disquiet, so disturbed our imagination and our desires as the life of lies we add, thanks to literature, to the one we have, so we can be protagonists in the great adventures, the great passions real life will never give us. The lies of literature become truths through us, the readers transformed, infected with longings and, through the fault of fiction, permanently questioning a mediocre reality. Sorcery, when literature offers us the hope of having what we do not have, being what we are not, acceding to that impossible existence where like pagan gods we feel mortal and eternal at the same time, that introduces into our spirits non-conformity and rebellion, which are behind all the heroic deeds that have contributed to the reduction of violence in human relationships. Reducing violence, not ending it. Because ours will always be, fortunately, an unfinished story. That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility.
Mario Vargas Llosa
We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Mario Vargas Llosa
It isn't that as time goes by you're learning sorcery; rather, what you're learning is to save energy. And this energy will enable you to handle some of the energy fields that are not employed in perceiving the ordinary world we know. Sorcery is a state of awareness.
Carlos Castañeda
The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Charity is today a 'political charity.'. . . it means the transformation of a society structured to benefit a few who appropriate to themselves the value of the work of others. This transformation ought to be directed toward a radical change in the foundation of society, that is, the private ownership of the means of production.
Gustavo Gutiérrez
Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.
Carlos Castañeda
Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.
Mario Vargas Llosa