Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 16

I discovered that seventeen-year-old girls have such huge verbal energy that their brain drives them to expend it every twenty seconds. On the third day I decided I had to find her a boyfriend -- if possible, a deaf one.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never trust girls who let themselves be touched right away. But even less those who need a priest for approval.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't need to know how it works to get a shock on the fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.
Salvador Dalí
The majority of men have no opinions, and these have to be pumped into them from outside, like lubricants into machinery. Hence it is necessary that some mind or other should hold and exercise authority, so that the people without opinions- the majority- can start having opinions. For without these, the common life of humanity would be chaos, a historic void, lacking in any organic structure. Consequently, without a spiritual power, without someone to command, and in proportion as this is lacking, chaos reigns over mankind.
Ortega y Gasset
A concrete example of this mechanism is found in one of the most alarming phenomena of the last thirty years: the enormous increase in the police force of all countries. The increase of population has inevitably rendered it necessary. However accustomed we may be to it, the terrible paradox should not escape our minds that the population of a great modern city, in order to move about peaceably and attend to its business, necessarily requires a police force to regulate the circulation. But it is foolishness for the party of "law and order" to imagine that these "forces of public authority" created to preserve order are always going to be content to preserve the order that that party desires. Inevitably they will end by themselves defining and deciding on the order they are going to impose- which, naturally, will be that which suits them best.
Ortega y Gasset
A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.
Núria Añó
Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to "Don Quixote"—have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest the common saying, "Under my cloak I kill the king;" all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I swear to hold my tongue about it till the end of your worship's days, and God grant I may be able to let it out tomorrow
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I don't see what my arse has to do with enchantings!
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Freedom is not an individual effort.Yours comes only when you grant others theirs
Sergio Aragonés
She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.
Núria Añó
The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Keep your dreams, you will never know when you need them
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
For even in dreams a good deed is not lost.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
…And my heart openedlike a flower under sky,its petals of desire,its stamens of dreams…
Federico García Lorca
He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Man needed to dream. Yes, he needed to believe in illusions, to aspire to something more than the miserable, hostile life that suffocated him.
Félix J. Palma
Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul Yet uncorrected of the higher will, So that men sometimes in their dreams confessAn unsuspected, or forgotten, self; -Since Dreaming, Madness, Passion, are akinIn missing each that salutory reinOf reason, and the grinding will of man.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
Every book has a soul, the soul of the person who wrote it and the soul of those who read it and dream about it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
Salvador Dalí
nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Nothing is more prejudicial to war than talk.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo
What does the corpse care who was right and who was wrong?
Manuel Azaña
See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.
Manuel Rivas
He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
one may know how to gain victory, and know not how to use it
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
...the wrath of God pales beside that of man.
Félix J. Palma
All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.
Javier Cercas
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Driven by a wish to save Tomás from a life of penury and misunderstanding, Fermin had decided that he needed to develop my friend's latent conversational and social skills.Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That's the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Smart people have the brains, but stupid people have the balls
Ana Sáez González
Someone once said: "We do not make friends, we recognize them." And you'll know who they are because they play according to the same rules that you do.
Ken Niimura
Though such authority and respect shouldn't be handed to all and sundry, have in caution's innermost room a confidant, a faithful mirror, whose correction you value when disillusionment is necessary.
Baltasar Gracián
It might even teach Murray that while finding true love was one of the most wonderful things that could happen to you in life, finding a friend was equally splendid.
Félix J. Palma
There are three types of friends: those like food without which you can't live those like medicine which you need occasionally and those like an illness which you never want.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... To find one real friend in a lifetime is a good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.
Baltasar Gracián
Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
Baltasar Gracián
I don't suppose you have many friends. Neither do I. I don't trust people who say they have a lot of friends. It's a sure sign that they don't really know anyone.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso
Fear? There is no fear when you ride a MotoGP bike. If there is fear, you don't enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy it, you'd better stay at home.
Álvaro Bautista Arce
Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There is no wisdom for a man without harmony, and without harmony there is no contemplation. Without contemplation there cannot be peace, and without peace can there be joy?
Juan Mascaró
You can tell if someone really loves Books by the way they look at them, how they open and close them, how they turn the pages.
Milena Busquets
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
... Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
Roberto Bolaño
I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts
Roberto Bolaño
Aryami Bose's home had been closed up for years, inhabited only by books and paintings, but the spectre of thousands of memories imprisoned between its walls still permeated the house.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Never before had I felt trapped, so seduced and caught up in a story,' Clara explained, 'the way I did with that book. Until then, reading was just a duty, a sort of fine one had to pay teachers and tutors without quite knowing why. I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. This is a world of shadows, Daniel, and magic is a rare asset. That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone, changed my life.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Roberto Bolaño
He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.
Roberto Bolaño
To Senor Sempere, the best friend a book could ever have: you opened the doors to the world for me and showed me how to go through them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.
Enrique Vila-Matas
Suddenly the reader's eyes were filled with tears, and a loving voice whispered in his ear: -Why are you crying if everything in that book isn't true?- And the reader replied: -I know; but what I feel is real.
Ángel González