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Quotes by Spanish Authors
"Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses."
"All business opportunities stem from someone else's inability to resolve a simple and inevitable problem."
"He 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."
"A Gentleman's agreement cannot be broken without breaking the person who has entered into it."
"You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking."
"Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands."
"There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse."
"The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?"
"Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself."
"Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived."
"Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame."
"We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell."
"You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court."
"I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose."
"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."
"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 ..."
"Without further ado I left the place, finding my route by the marks I had made on the way in. As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. 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."
"The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows."
"Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it."
"When you are young and without success you have only a few friends. Then later on when you are rich and famous you still have a few ... if you are lucky."
"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."
"The night I met him [he] told me that, for some reason, life usually grants us what we are not looking for. He was given wealth, fame, and power, yet his soul yearned only for spiritual peace so that he could silence the shadows in his heart..."
"I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets."
"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."
"Future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press."
"A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."
"After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels."
"I've learnt that solitude is sometimes a path that leads to peace."
"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."
"In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams."
"Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books."
"Its impossible to initiate a rational dialogue with some one about beliefs and concepts if he has not acquired them through reason. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at God, race, or national pride."
"The distance is great from the firm belief to the realization from concrete experience."
"Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."
"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."
"Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn."
"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."
"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."
"Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away."
"Time has taught me not to lose hope, yet not to trust too much in hope either."
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