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Quotes by Argentinian Authors
"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."
"One encounter with Jesus Christ is enough to change you, instantly, forever."
"For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free."
"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."
"Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives."
"Two days after moving we recommended ourselves to God, Our Lord, and fled, hoping that, although it was late in the season and the fruits of the tunas were giving out, by remaining in the field we might still get over a good portion of the land."
"I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
"It's amazing, it doesn't feel like it has been 10 years since retirement."
"I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful."
"There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle."
"I am honest and want to hear what the people have to say. I do not want to enrich myself in this job."
"I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized."
"Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective."
"I want not, that everybody hears about. Then I can't longer be myself."
"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god."
"If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force."
"God is not disillusioned with us. He never had any illusions to begin with."
"It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope."
"We ask from the heart that supermarkets, which are now more profitable and selling more, help us to take care of the pocketbook of the people by not raising prices."
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."
"I have an office in Argentina, I go there every day, so I work."
"We will learn together how to solve the problems of the country."
"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
"There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite."
"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."
"If you're always strict with yourself, life gets miserable. And we're supposed to enjoy life."
"Seeing that our thirst was increasing and the water was killing us, while the storm did not abate, we agreed to trust to God, Our Lord, and rather risk the perils of the sea than wait there for certain death from thirst."
"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."
"All over the land are vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people."
"Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages."
"One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet."
"If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell."
"We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods."
"Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies - for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry - I say to myself, "What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home."
"Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?"
"It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."
"He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite."
"But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over."
"Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."
"In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect."
"The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement."
"As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless."
"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."
"There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music."
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