Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 9

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
Alfonso X of Castile
When the I AM THAT I AM made nothingAnd rested, which rest it certainly deserved,Night now accompanied day, and manHad his friend in the absence of the woman.
Antonio Machado
Life has enough torturers as it is, without you going around moonlighting as a Grand Inquisitor against yourself.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
What about the future?""We'll talk about the future when it gets here.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
No fear is unbearable, she concluded, unless you've got time on your hands and a healthy imagination.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Vidal had his exuberant and stately tower in the most elegant and elevated part of Pedralbes, surrounded by hills, trees, and fairy-tale skies. I would have my sinister tower rising above the oldest, darkest streets of the city, surrounded by the miasmas and the shadows of that necropolis which poets and murderers had once called the "Rose of Fire.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!
Pablo Picasso
Then she leant over and kissed him very slowly, with infinite tenderness. As if she had had to wait an eternity to do so.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
VR and AR will eventually converge, and smart glasses will take over our digital interactions.
Carlos López (Founder @ Oarsis)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
We never surrendered. We always kept in our hearts the most noble, beautiful feeling that sets human beings apart: hope.
Manel Loureiro
I don't know if cats understand what their owners say, but they do have a strong survival instinct.
Manel Loureiro
The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.
José Ortega y Gasset
God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery, transformation, God and Grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.
San Juan de la Cruz
A confused labyrinth of smoky starsentangles my hopes,which are nearly faded
Federico García Lorca
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
Roberto Bolaño
Tell me thy company, and I'll tell thee what thou art
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
That which costs little is less valued.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.
José Ortega y Gasset
You must have been working very hard here, with so few distractions.”Mary’s eyes darkened and she looked away.“Not quite as much as I hoped for. At times the loneliness and the unanswered questions can get overwhelming, like very loud voices echoing inside my head, just asking ‘why’ ‘who’ and making me think about my wasted life.
Olga Núñez Miret
It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did to me, and that he’d been punished for it, and I might as well concentrate on the rest of my life, because over that…I had some control and I could decide what to do. I could change it over; I could become anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.
Olga Núñez Miret
I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.
Olga Núñez Miret
there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?
Javier Marías
Some disappointments honor those who inspire them
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Sage was asked to define good manners? to which he replied, To bear patiently the rude ones.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Don't try to rush things: for the cup to run over, it must first be filled.
Antonio Machado
To find is the thing.
Pablo Picasso
For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophet—to cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophets, Isaiah, made it notable, of course, when he spoke of himself as the voice of one "crying in the wilderness." Because the mission of the intellectual is to be the man who, from his desert, his basic solitude—and man is only man amid his truth, only himself when he is alone—cries aloud to others and invites them to each into his own solitude.
José Ortega y Gasset
I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Who are the lunatics? The ones who see horror in the heart of their fellow humans and search for peace at any price? Or the ones who pretend they don't see what's going on around them? The world belongs either to lunatics or hypocrites. There are no other races on this earth. You must choose which one to belong to.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you're busy escaping from the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf
Susana Fortes
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
Roberto Bolaño
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
Whoever said that childhood is the happiest time of your life is a liar, or a fool.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The great art of giving consists in this the gift should cost very little and yet be greatly coveted, so that it may be the more highly appreciated.
Baltasar Gracián
In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that was to hound me for years.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Kneel!” he ordered.tMy head raised in defiance, I stepped forward. “I am Princess Andrea de Montemaior. I will kneel to no one,” I said to the shadows inside.
Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban
Yes, I felt very small. The typewriter seemed larger than a piano, I was less than a molecule. What could I do? I drank more.-pg 237
Albert Sánchez Piñol
I just came this morning and haven't been debriefed yet about the status of our latest prisoners. As a matter of fact, I'd barely stepped inside,
Elle Aycart
What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.
Javier Marías
What I will no longer accept is the mediocre life of a modest little gentleman.
Joan Miró
Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.
San Juan de la Cruz
A law of life: at the precise instant when someone tells a truth, that truth is transformed into a story
Enrique de Hériz
He clung to the story as to a vow whose abandonment might bring down on his head all kinds of grief and misfortune. He felt very alone, on an interminable day full of evil omens, and the story, though resistant to some of his intentions, was at least a testimony to reality and coherence
José María Merino
I would have preferred someone else to have been in charge of rescuing this story, but once again life has taught me that my role is to be a witness, not the leading actor.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
the media are not the holders of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided.
Manuel Castells
Respect yourself is you would have others respect you.
Baltasar Gracián
People beleived that the most devastating part of a war are the corpses with their guts out in the open, the puddles of blood, and all that you can capture at first glance. But sometimes the horror is off to the side, in the lost look on the face of a woman who's just been raped, as she limps away alone within the ruins, trying to keep her head down. Gerda and Capa were not aware of this yet. They were too young. And that was their first conflict. They still believed war had its romantic side.
Susana Fortes
Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity - or none at all - with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I guessed she must be, at most, twenty, but there was something about her manner that made me think she could be ageless. She seemed trapped in that state of perpetual youth reserved for mannequins in shop windows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
For when the mind becomes bound to a passion of the wandering senses, this passion carries away man's wisdom, even as the wind drives a vessel on the waves.
Juan Mascaró
[H]e lay awake, dreading the dawn when he would have to say good-bye to the small universe he had built for himself over the years.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
We arrived and the miracle happened.It was the sea and the wind in the bells.We came from far, from years Thirsty as dust, from humble fishermen’s nets on barren shore."~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de Birnam, Consell Insular D'Eivissa, 2007).Translated from the Spanish by Helene Cardona.
José Manuel Cardona
Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely, the better. … It’s difficult to hate an idea. … It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group … anything.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
So seek beauty, Miss Prim. Seek it in silence, in tranquillity; seek it in the middle of the night and at dawn. Pause to close doors while you seek it, and don't be surprised if it doesn't reside in museums or in palaces. Don't be surprised if, in the end, you find beauty to be not in Something but Someone.
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera