Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 13

While I don't equate the dark night with depression, I do think our depressive moods could be imagined spiritually rather than only psychologically.
San Juan de la Cruz
The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If every word introduces a new concept, the simple phrase "all that which does not exist" is sufficient to make everything that does not exist, exist.
Pablo Tusset
His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.
Roberto Bolaño
He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Jacinta never told Penelope that she loved her. The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
They can be like the sun, words.They can do for the heart what light can for a field.
San Juan de la Cruz
The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.
Roberto Bolaño
A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.
Roberto Bolaño
I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin. "That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.
Roberto Bolaño
I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every book is the I Ching. You pick it up, open it, and there it is, there you are.
Andrés Neuman
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.
Roberto Bolaño
In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I don't believe in God, I only believe in Al Pacino, and that's the truth.
Javier Bardem
The fact that it is sometimes difficult for me to believe in God doesn't mean that I deny his existence. If I stopped believing in him, I wouldn't be able to continue living.
Rafael Ábalos
We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.
Javier Marías
... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Nothing is ever behind us.
Roberto Bolaño
Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.
Enrique de Hériz
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
All live and die believing that they have known love, thinking it is a common thing, because they confuse it with animal satisfaction; but love is a privilege, love is a lottery of fate, like wealth, like beauty, which only a small minority enjoy....
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez
The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.
Roberto Bolaño
We're born with a mapped-out route. This one, not that one. Who you dream with. Who you love. It's one or the other. You choose without choosing. That's how it is. Each of us travels on their own path. Besides, how do you love someone without truly knowing who they are? How do you travel that distance when there's all that you don't know about the other?
Susana Fortes
Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it, let us fight against destiny, even without hope of victory.
Miguel de Unamuno
Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Be slow of tongue and quick of eye.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.
Maimonides
Sometimes, staying alive solely depends on keeping your head in place and your senses alert
Susana Fortes
Thinking of things" is but a special way of dealing with them; but, as is obvious, it is a secondary manner of doing so and thus presupposes another [i.e., the primordial one]. The fundamental error—the "intellectualist" error—committed in Greece and modern Europe is tantamount to presupposing the opposite and to regarding one's intellectual manner of relating to things as one's primordial way of living. Descartes thus dared to define a human being, that is, the one living or "self," as une chose qui pense d'autres choses ["a thing that thinks of other things"]. That's done it! As if living were just being engaged in thinking of things! What about stumbling on them?
José Ortega y Gasset
Europe, the land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts. The land where the economy gets to stagger all over the continent.
Núria Añó
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.
Miguel de Unamuno
To spoil means to put no limit on caprice, to give one the impression that everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations. The young child exposed to this regime has no experience of its own limits. By reason of the removal of all external restraint, all clashing with other things, he comes actually to believe that he is the only one that exists, and gets used to not considering others, especially not considering them as superior to himself. This feeling of another's superiority could only be instilled into him by someone who, being stronger than he is, should force him to give up some desire, to restrict himself, to restrain himself. He would then have learned this fundamental discipline: "Here I end and here begins another more powerful than I am. In the world, apparently, there are two people: I myself and another superior to me.
Ortega y Gasset
You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears.
Roberto Bolaño
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
Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.
Javier Marías
When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.
Javier Marías
Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.
Javier Marías
Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
Javier Marías
If one were to reply that those who compose these books write them as fictions, and therefore are not obliged to consider the fine points of truth, I should respond that the more truthful the fiction, the better it is, and the more probable and possible, the more pleasing. Fictional tales must engage the minds of those who read them, and by restraining exaggeration and moderating impossibility, they enthrall the spirit and thereby astonish, captivate, delight, and entertain, allowing wonder and joy to move together at the same pace; none of these things can be accomplished by fleeing verisimilitude and mimesis, which together constitute perfection in writing.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The problem nowadays is that children have become too much the center of attention. Their parents, their families, everybody around them feels a need to put them on a pedestal. So much effort is invested in boosting their self-esteem that they are made to feel special in and of themselves, without having done anything.
Rafael Nadal
The indescribable pleasure—which pales the rest of life's joys—is abundant compensation for the investigator who endures the painful and persevering analytical work that precedes the appearance of the new truth, like the pain of childbirth. It is true to say that nothing for the scientific scholar is comparable to the things that he has discovered. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an investigator willing to exchange the paternity of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there are some who look to science as a way of acquiring gold instead of applause from the learned, and the personal satisfaction associated with the very act of discovery, they have chosen the wrong profession.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
After the gratifications of brutish appetites are past, the greatest pleasure then is to get rid of that which entertained it.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.
Salvador Dalí
To see you naked is to recall the Earth.
Garcia Lorca
I can see that you’re down in the dumps, Unc. Shall we stop working and call Toni?”“And then what?”“I don’t know. But if it so happens that I’m more of your type . . . Would you like me to give you a blow job? That really does the trick when you’re feeling depressed.
Juan Marsé
You don't look well," he pronounced."Indigestion," I replied."From what?""Reality.""Join the queue.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own...
José Ortega y Gasset
So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "what is truth as such," and with regard to reality, not what things are or what and how is that which is, but for what reason that X which we call Being is in the Universe, and with regard to knowledge we must not ask for its bases and limits—as Plato, Aristotle Descartes, Kant did—but for something which comes before all this: for what reason we concern ourselves with trying to know.
José Ortega y Gasset
Now, back in the reality that always lies in wait among the shadows of the Ensanche quarter, the enchantment was lifting, and all I had was painful desire and an indescribable restlessness.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To say "all that which does not exist" is to introduce, effectively, a new concept, but it does not bring into existence anything more than that very concept which it introduces. That is, a certain entity about which we know nothing except that it bears the name of "all that which does not exist.
Pablo Tusset
It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón