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"No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing."
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Exlpore more Despair quotes
"It's despair at the lack of (I'm cheating, I didn't say all these things - but I'm going to write what I want to say as well as what I did) feeling, of love, of reason in the world. It's despair that anyone can even contemplate the idea of dropping a bomb or ordering that it should be dropped. It's despair that so few of us care. It's despair that there's so much brutality and callousness in the world."
"For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."
"We destroy ourselves when we are ignorant or decide to live in ignorance."
"Satan's despair is absolute because Satan, as pure spirit, is pure consciousness, and for Satan (and all men in his predicament) every increase in consciousness is an increase in despair."
"Please give me a single reason why I shouldn't hurl myself beneath the wheels of that bus."
"After some time he felt for his pipe. It was not broken, and that was something. Then he felt for his pouch, and there was some tobacco in it, and that was something more. Then he felt for matches and he could not find any at all, and that shattered his hopes completely."
"Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable..."
"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the lips and face and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smile and kept moving. If I could have physically passed away, just let it all go, like that, without doing anything, stepped out of life as easily as walking through a door I would have done. But I was going to sleep at night and waking in the morning, disappointed to be there and resigned to existence."
Explore more quotes by Mario Vargas Llosa
"If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know."
"Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary."
"Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty."
"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."
"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."
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