Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 14

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Right then, in a nutshell: this one hasn't a single bone of obedient-little-wife material in her heavenly body.''Hasn't she? Then what kind of bone does your expertise detect?'Fermin came closer, adopting a confidential tone. 'The passionate kind,' he said, raising his eyebrows with an air of mystery. 'And you can be sure I mean that as a compliment.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Roberto Bolaño
When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what best suits his interests, his whims, his intellectual manias. To escape the void and the perplexities of his own soul, a man will rush to join any party standard that is being carried through the streets. With society gone there remain only parties.
José Ortega y Gasset
Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
José Ortega y Gasset
It's possible, and I stress possible, that such a moment may never come: you may not fall in love, you may not be able to or you may not wish to give your whole life to anyone, and, like me, you may turn forty-five one day and realize that you're no longer young and you have never found a choir of cupids with lyres or a bed of white roses leading to the altar. The only revenge left for you then will be to steal from life the pleasure of firm and passionate flesh - a pleasure that evaporates faster than good intentions and is the nearest thing to heaven you will find in this stinking world where everything decays, beginning with beauty and ending with memory.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can still cling to.
Don Juan
A life without memory is no life at all
Luis Buñuel
And she saw beauty even in the tiny sparkles of dust suspended in the air, high above.
Rocio Sanchez
I come to a world of iron to make a world of gold.
Cervantes
There is remedy for all things except death - Don Quixote De La Mancha
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.
Maimonides
The night I met him [he] told me that, for some reason, life usually grants us what we are not looking for. He was given wealth, fame, and power, yet his soul yearned only for spiritual peace so that he could silence the shadows in his heart...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There is a force more powerful than steam and electricity: the will.
Fernán Caballero
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man
José Ortega y Gasset
Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, self-reflection reveals that this connected unity is the ultimate reality that can be reached. "Consciousness cannot go behind itself." Whatever we propose to think forms part of this organic unity of our mind and is a result or consequence of it. There is no means of jumping beyond consciousness, and any attempt to explain with the help of any other imaginary system the radical connectedness in which we live and that is our mind would be absurd. Our mind is the very presupposition of all explanation. For to explain a phenomenon means, in the last instance, to point out its place and its part within the living economy of consciousness, and to determine the "meaning" it has in the original source of all meaning: life.
José Ortega y Gasset
If you ever have a daughter—a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's Murphy's Law that sooner or later she will break your heart—anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don't. Whoever says that's not true is lying through his teeth.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that huge, disorderly, anti-animal fantasy. What we call reason is no more than fantasy put into shape. Is there anything in the world more fantastic than that which is the most rational? Is there anything more fantastic than the mathematical point, and the infinite line, and, in general, all mathematics and all physics? Is there a more fantastic fancy than what we call "justice" and the other thing that we call "happiness"?
José Ortega y Gasset
I imagine some people, like some toys, are born defective - which I suppose makes us all broken toys, don't you think?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana
How do you imagine Hell, sir Blacksad ? For me, it's a place without music... of complete silence.
Juan Díaz Canales
He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He who sings scares away his woes.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
And hearing her breathe softly by his side, Wells understood that, as so often happened, his wife knew what he wanted so much better than he did, and that if only he had asked her, he could have saved all that time he taken coming to a decision which, in addition, now proved to be the wrong one. Yes, he told himself, sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want.
Félix J. Palma
People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.
Javier Marías
Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.
Núria Añó
The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.
George Santayana
Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.“Yet consider.“Consider pain.“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.
Jesus I. Aldapuerta
Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death,but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit,nor in the air, nor in our lives,nor on these terraces of billowing smoke.The genuine pain that keeps everything awakeis a tiny, infinite burnon the innocent eyes of other systems.
Federico García Lorca
A light which lives on what the flames devour,a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,a crucifixion by a single wound,a sky and earth that darken by each hour,a sob of blood whose red ribbon adornsa lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--this is the wreath of love, this bed of thornsis where I dream of you stealing my rest,haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.I sought the peak of prudence, but I foundthe hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,and my own thirst for bitter truth an
Federico García Lorca
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.
Roberto Bolaño
The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn't fit inside your body.
Manuel Rivas
Action is the foundational key to all success.
Pablo Picasso
The earth has its music for those who will listen.
George Santayana
Consciousness is a born hermit.
George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first.
Antoni Gaudí
Making money isn't hard in itself,' he complained. 'What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.
Núria Añó
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.
Manuel Rivas
Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob.
Federico García Lorca
Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced. Not that it affords positive solutions to the new aspect of vital conditions- life is always different from what it was- but that it prevents us committing the ingenuous mistakes of other times. But if, in addition to being old and, therefore, beginning to find life difficult, you have lost the memory of the past, and do not profit by experience, then everything turns to disadvantage. Well, it is my belief that this is the situation of Europe. The most "cultured" people to-day are suffering from incredible ignorance of history.
Ortega y Gasset
The masses are advancing," said Hegel in apocalyptic fashion. "Without some new spiritual influence, our age, which is a revolutionary age, will produce a catastrophe," was the pronouncement of Comte. "I see the flood-tide of nihilism rising," shrieked Nietzsche from a crag of the Engadine. It is false to say that history cannot be foretold. Numberless times this has been done. If the future offered no opening to prophecy, it could not be understood when fulfilled in the present and on the point of falling back into the past. The idea that the historian is on the reverse side a prophet, sums up the whole philosophy of history, It is true that it is only possible to anticipate the general structure of the future, but that is all that we in truth understand of the past or of the present.
Ortega y Gasset
future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
An individual is no match for history.
Roberto Bolaño
That was my story. Or at least the way I remember it. What happened to those characters and the places that had to do with those turbulent times, can be researched in libraries or the memories of the elderly. People like Beigbeder, Rosalinda, or Hillgarth went on to the history books.People like Marcus and me didn't. But that doesn't mean our lives were less important. Because, in the end, we all play a part in the world's fate. And Marcus and I always stood on the other side of the story.Actively invisible during that time we lived in between the seams.
María Dueñas
In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and inconsequential, he does not attempt to pass over them in silence; his example could be followed by solemn historians who recount actions so briefly and succinctly that we can barely taste them, and leave behind in the inkwell, through carelessness, malice, or ignorance, the most substantive part of the work.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.
Américo Castro
And I thought:History is like a horror story.
Roberto Bolaño
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
And I thought:History is like a horror story.
Roberto Bolaño
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
This was where she discovered that intelligence, this wonderful gift, grows in silence, not in noise. It was here too that she learnt that a human mind, a truly human mind, is nurtured over time, with hard work and discipline.
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera