Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 8

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.
Roberto Bolaño
For everything in life there is always a beginning and an end. This is the tough part the most difficult thing when you see that it’s coming: The end.
Seve Ballesteros
My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.
Salvador de Madariaga
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
[Showing the apartment to Tiziano ]MARLEEN WALKER: “Let me alert you that animals are banned in this building.”TIZIANO CONTI: “Am I breaking the law right now?
Merce Cardus
We know already ample experience that it does not require much cleverness or much learning to be a governor, for there are a hundred round about us that scarcely know how to read.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Take God for your spouse and friend and walk with him continually, and you will not sin and will learn to love, and the things you must do will work out prosperously for you.
St John of the Cross
God gives us life, but the world's landlord is the devil....
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fighting risk and we do not approach dangerous, agile, and two-horned topics?
José Ortega y Gasset
... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Roberto Bolaño
Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Learning to embrace and savor rejection is one of the best things that entrepreneurs can do. Launching a startup is the time to find your ever-optimistic inner child again.
Alejandro Cremades
Business is still more often about whom you know, not what you know.
Alejandro Cremades
Ideas are meaningless without a masterful execution.
Alejandro Cremades
Don’t expect investors to be throwing millions on the table for you to go off and buy a bigger house, get a new car, party half the week away, and generally upgrade your lifestyle.
Alejandro Cremades
If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.
Alejandro Cremades
Business success requires business preparation. You don't have to be a master tactician, but you do need to have a plan in place. This plan will act as a foundation for everything you want to achieve.
Alejandro Cremades
One of the best ways to attract capital is to outperform the competition.
Alejandro Cremades
The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.
Alejandro Cremades
A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.
Francisco Márquez Villanueva
...in the worst of circumstances, the hypocrite who pretends to be good does less harm than the public sinner.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
...if the verses are for a literary competition, your grace should try to win second place; first is always won through favor or because of the high estate of the person, second is won because of pure justice, and by this calculation third becomes second, and the first becomes third...
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
But first you have to fight, to try other ways. If your life displeases you, my lad, try to change it. Don't give in to defeat so easily. Death is the only sure defeat. It is the end of everything.
Félix J. Palma
All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When no one is left to tell what happened, family histories keep their secrets.
Carmen Posadas
A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The day we didn't spend together, we will never spend together, what someone was going to say to us on the phone when they called and we didn't answer will never be said, at least not exactly the same thing said in exactly the same spirit; and everything will be slightly different or even completely different because of the lack of courage which dissuades us from talking to you.....none of that will ever be repeated and consequently a time will come when having been together will be the same as not having been together, and having picked up the phone the same as not having done so, and having dared to speak to you the same as if we'd remained silent
Javier Marías
The authors analyzed 695 news items. The content of 47.9% (n = 333) of the articles was not strictly related to mental illness, but rather clinical or psychiatric terms were used metaphorically, and frequently in a pejorative sense. The remaining 52.1% (n = 362) consisted of news items related specifically to mental illness. Of these, news items linking mental illness to danger were the most common (178 texts, 49.2%), specifically those associating mental illness with violent crime (130 texts, 35.9%) or a danger to others (126 texts, 34.8%). The results confirm the hypothesis that the press treats mental illness in a manner that encourages stigmatization. The authors appeal to the press's responsibility to society and advocate an active role in reducing the stigma towards mental illness.Reinforcing Stigmatization: Coverage of Mental Illness in Spanish Newspapers. Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives. Volume 19, Issue 11, 2014
Enric Aragonès
And here I was thinking you were a bit slow, what with so much asking and not knowing anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Yo me salgo desnudo a la calle,maduro de versos perdidos.I step naked into the streetripe with lost poems.
Federico García Lorca
As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
Roberto Bolaño
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
We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.
Javier Marías
It really doesn't bother me," she said. "I've always thought it stupid to try to hide your age, or to pretend to be younger than you are. Denying your age is like denying your life.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
Yehuda HaLevi
Eight: the age of exploration, of ghosts and secret forays; the age at which a mystery lurks behind every curtain and every armoire opens into a magical world, which you may enter at any time, but who knows when you will return.
Carmen Posadas
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese
Luis Buñuel
an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.
Javier Marías
Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
And why have you burnt our Gods, when others are brought from other Regions by the Spaniards? Are the Gods of other Provinces more sacred than ours?
Bartolomé de las Casas
They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
It took me a lifetime.
Pablo Picasso
And as the wicked are always ungrateful, and necessity leads to evil doing, and immediate advantage overcomes all considerations of the future, Ginés, who was neither grateful nor well-principled, made up his mind to steal Sancho Panza's ass.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
El Sueno de la razon produce monstrous. (The sleep of reason breeds monsters)
Francisco de Goya
The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.
Pablo Picasso
Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.
Salvador Dalí
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
Roberto Bolaño
One must speak in such a way that although someone else, or many others, or an infinite number of people have said it before, it seems as though you said it first.
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.
Camilo José Cela
Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.
Roberto Bolaño
A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, ‘Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?’ And the sage answered him, ‘Precisely for that reason—because it does not avail.
Miguel de Unamuno
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the sum of his own works.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
...the clearer the light is, the more it blinds and darkens the pupil of the owl; and the more we look at the sun, the greater is the darkness it causes in our vision ... in the same way, when the divine light of contemplation assails the soul that is not wholly enlightened, it causes spiritual darkness within it.
San Juan de la Cruz
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
Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything that we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partially responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens, or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone—though not necessarily to the same person—and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping might scrutinize, set aside, and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once, although...it must be told when the time is right, or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognize that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another.
Javier Marías
It was strange to see the keenness with which men had tried to order, constrain, and systematize human passions, jealousy, rage, violent death, accusations. That was the justice system (...): the absurd pretension that human nature could be dominated by the power of the law. Reducing it all to a summary of a few pages, organizing the facts, judging it, archiving it, and forgetting it. That simple. And yet in the silence of that place you could hear the murmur of the written words, of the key players, the screams of the victims, the hatred never forgotten by either party, the pain that never went away.
Víctor del Árbol
I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.
Roberto Bolaño