Quotes by Argentinian Authors - Page 6

Every day People straighten up the hair, why not the heart?
Ernesto Che Guevara
Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.
Julio Cortázar
Families who lovingly accept the difficult trial of a child with special needs are greatly to be admired. They render the Church and society an invaluable witness of faithfulness to the gift of life. In these situations, the family can discover, together with the Christian community, new approaches, new ways of acting, a different way of understanding and identifying with others, by welcoming and caring for the mystery of the frailty of human life. People with disabilities are a gift for the family and an opportunity to grow in love, mutual aid and unity… If the family, in the light of the faith, accepts the presence of persons with special needs, they will be able to recognize and ensure the quality and value of every human life, with its proper needs, rights and opportunities.
Pope Francis
It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.
Alberto Manguel
And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream.Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for.The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.
Jorge Luis Borges
Let's think of that moment when a woman washed the feet of Jesus with the nard, so expensive: it is a religious moment, a moment of gratitude, a moment of love. And he [Judas] stands apart with bitter criticism: 'But this could have been used for the poor!' This is the first reference that I have found, in the Gospel, to poverty as an ideology. The ideologue does not know what love is, because he does nt know how to give himself.
Pope Francis
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
No amount of 'peace-building' will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained, in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins, or excludes a part of itself; it loses something essential. We must never, never allow the throwaway culture to enter our hearts! ... No one is disposable!
Pope Francis
In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.
Alberto Manguel
A full heart has room for everything and empty heart has room for nothing. Who understands?
Antonio Porchia
We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder... as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us--the recognition of something we never knew was there...
Alberto Manguel
It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or underwater; I pictured it as infinite—a labyrinth not of octagonal pavillions and paths that turn back upon themselves, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms....I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges
Narcissism makes people incapable of looking beyond themselves, beyond their own desires and needs.
Pope Francis
Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.
Julio Cortázar
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
Happiness means knowing how to limit some needs which only diminish us, and being open to the many different possibilities which life can offer.
Pope Francis
All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last.
Jorge Luis Borges
He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.
César Aira
We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.
Alberto Manguel
Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.
Alberto Manguel
Art is fire plus algebra.
Jorge Luis Borges
But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and played the role of Death. Because, how can Death possibly die?
Alejandra Pizarnik
Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness]
Ernesto Che Guevara
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.
Julio Cortázar
For youth, sexual love is whim; for the aged, luxury.
Bill Gaede
I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.
Jorge Luis Borges
The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.
Jorge Luis Borges
To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books.
Carlos María Domínguez
Erase self-doubt by working to build your strengths instead of focusing on your weaknesses.
Rodolfo Costa
We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla is a social reformer, who takes up arms responding to the angry protests of the people against their oppressors, and who fights to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and poverty.
Ernesto Che Guevara
Natural marriage, therefore, is fully understood in the light of its fulfilment in the sacrament of Matrimony: only in contemplating Christ does a person come to know the deepest truth about human relationships.
Pope Francis
Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1)
Jorge Luis Borges
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges
A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.
César Aira
There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man.
Bill Gaede
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Jorge Luis Borges
Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.
Jorge Luis Borges
Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.
Claudia Piñeiro
We are the last generation of humans on Earth!
Bill Gaede
Look, words are like the air: they belong to everybody. Words are not the problem; it's the tone, the context, where those words are aimed, and in whose company they are uttered. Of course murderers and victims use the same words, but I never read the words utopia, or beauty, or tenderness in police descriptions. Do you know that the Argentinean dictatorship burnt The Little Prince ? And I think they were right to do so, not because I do not love The Little Prince , but because the book is so full of tenderness that it would harm any dictatorship.
Juan Gelman
Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.
Julio Cortázar
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Julio Cortázar
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortázar
I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.
Jorge Luis Borges
I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness
Jorge Luis Borges
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
Jorge Luis Borges
Set yourself free. Realize you already have everything you need and don’t need anything else.
Mabel Katz
For the one who writes it . . . a story is like a mirror.
Sylvia Iparraguirre
I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces.
Jorge Luis Borges
Paradise will be a kind of library
Jorge Luis Borges
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
Julio Cortázar
Mercy will always be greater than any sin, no one can put a limit on the love of the all-forgiving God. Just by looking at him, just raising our eyes from ourselves and our wounds, we leave an opening for the action of his grace. Jesus performs miracles with our sins, with what we are, with our nothingness, with our wretchedness.
Pope Francis
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
Antonio Porchia
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
Alberto Manguel
He who does not know how to believe, should not know.
Antonio Porchia
Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Jorge Luis Borges
Truth is a relationship. As such, each one of us receives the truth and expresses it from within, that is to say, according to one's own circumstances, culture, and situation in life.
Pope Francis
Student-people are different from other people. They spend their entire life asking questions, and as soon as they have found out the answers, they start all over again with new, harder questions... when a student-person finds a good answer to a hard question, the other student-people will gasp, hug each other, and then throw a party. Those parties never last long, for student-people are in a hurry to go back to work and find new answers.
Roberto Trotta
I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
Daniel Barenboim