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Quotes by Spanish Authors
“The day I die, all that was once mine will be yours, Julián, he would say. Except my dreams.”
"Don Ricardo wanted a successor worthy of himself. Jorge would always be cocooned in the privileges of his class, hiding from his mediocrity in creature comforts. Penelope, the beautiful Penelope, was a woman, and therefore a treasure, not a treasurer. Julian, who had the soul of a poet, and therefore the soul of a murderer, fulfilled all the requirements. It was only a question of time."
"It was the first time I traveled alone, but I was not scared."
"Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day."
"If you ever have a daughter-a blessing I wouldn't wish on anyone, because it's Murphy's Law that sooner or later she will break your heart-anyhow, as I was saying, if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps: those you suspect are sleeping with her and those you don't. Whoever says that's not true is lying through his teeth."
"When I left, I had learnt nothing. I took nothing with me. At least, that's what I thought then."
"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."
"I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted."
"I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us."
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
"Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species."
"The same thing that had happened with the flowers was happening with my longing: once I held it in my hands, I didn't know where to put it."
"He was a brilliant man. People tend to become wary of individuals like him because their brilliance reminds them of their own mediocrity. Envy is a blind man who wants to pull out your eyes."
"Nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds."
"Delving into the past had unveiled a cruel lesson - that in the book of life it is perhaps best not to turn back pages; it was a path on which, whatever direction we took, we'd never be able to choose our own destiny."
"That profound night freedom was agreeable and exciting."
"Max had once read in one of his father's books that some childhood images become engraved in the mind like photographs, like scenes you can return to again and again and will always remember, no matter how much time goes by."
"One mustn't dream of one's future, one must earn it."
"As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows."
"We all give up great expectations along the way."
"They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better."
"Democratic power is the only voice most citizens have."
"The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?"
"It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology."
"You talk as if Bea were a trophy.''No, as if she were a blessing,' Fermin corrected."
"Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person."
"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you."
"This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit..."
"I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world."
"Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night a flower everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting - that they must understand."
"Mention the gothic, and many readers will probably picture gloomy castles and an assortment of sinister Victoriana. However, the truth is that the gothic genre has continued to flourish and evolve since the days of Bram Stoker, producing some of its most interesting and accomplished examples in the 20th century - in literature, film and beyond."
"We are willing to believe anything other than the truth."
"If you really want to possess a woman, you must think like her, and the first thing to do is win over her soul. The rest, that sweet, soft wrapping that steals away your senses and your virtue, is a bonus."
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
"You don't know what thirst is until you drink for the first time."
"When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll be the pope.' Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."
"In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody's best friend."
"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
"Nothing important is learned, it is simply remembered."
"Good artists copy, great artists steal."
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