Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 13

Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and this be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.
Javier Marías
...torna-se difícil acreditar Nele quando o céu e a terra podem chegar a se explicar por si mesmos.
Rafael Ábalos
Kneel!” he ordered.tMy head raised in defiance, I stepped forward. “I am Princess Andrea de Montemaior. I will kneel to no one,” I said to the shadows inside.
Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban
Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterwards.
St. Francis Xavier
...the wrath of God pales beside that of man.
Félix J. Palma
The earth has its music for those who will listen.
George Santayana
The bar . . . is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk.
Luis Buñuel
Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese
Luis Buñuel
Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT!
Felix Alba-Juez
What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn't pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it's as if he didn't. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I've chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact.
Luis Buñuel
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
George Santayana
Never trust he who trusts everyone.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
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.” Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a mustache - it is better for the health.However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several mustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Mustache? Mustache? Mustache?"Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of mustaches.
Salvador Dalí
I prefer for 'my world' to have the highest certification of being a faithful representation of the exterior world.
Jesus Zamora Bonilla
Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.
Federico García Lorca
Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.
José Ortega y Gasset
Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.
Roberto Bolaño
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
José Ortega y Gasset
All I know is that once Julián told the kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?
Félix J. Palma
Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees but what he feels what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Pablo Picasso
Christ has no body now but mine. He prays in me, works in me, looks through my eyes, speaks through my words, works through my hands, walks with my feet and loves with my heart.
St. Teresa Of Avila
This cures everything except stupidity, which is an epidemic on the rise.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
If you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate nor pain which death does not terminate.
Miguel de Cervantes
Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn't. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.
Roberto Bolaño
How could you fail to feel uplifted when a voice was telling you at every step that the year, month, day, season, place, even that very moment were blessed?
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera
At twenty a man is a peacock at thirty a lion at forty a camel at fifty a serpent at sixty a dog at seventy an ape at eighty nothing at all.
Baltasar Gracián
Respect yourself is you would have others respect you.
Baltasar Gracián
Elegance is elimination.
Cristóbal Balenciaga
A prudent man will think more important what fate has conceded to him than what it has denied.
Baltasar Gracián
I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
That was my story. Or at least the way I remember it. What happened to those characters and the places that had to do with those turbulent times, can be researched in libraries or the memories of the elderly. People like Beigbeder, Rosalinda, or Hillgarth went on to the history books.People like Marcus and me didn't. But that doesn't mean our lives were less important. Because, in the end, we all play a part in the world's fate. And Marcus and I always stood on the other side of the story.Actively invisible during that time we lived in between the seams.
María Dueñas
People tend to complicate their own lives, as if living isn't complicated enough
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
...I have to admit that I've ... always felt burdened by nostalgia, by a desire to stop time, to recapture things that have been lost. A sense that everything, absolutely everything, is on a journey from which there's no return.
Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera
Science says: "We must live " and seeks the means of prolonging increasing facilitating and amplifying life of making it tolerable and acceptable wisdom says: "We must die " and seeks how to make us die well.
Miguel de Unamuno
There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
When he stepped into the shower, the hit water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Mum is the word.
Miguel de Cervantes
Calisto, a companion of Ignatius, and who on recovering from a severe illness had heard of the imprisonment of Ignatius, hastened from Segnovia, where he was staying, and came to Alcala, that he, too, might be cast into prison.
Ignatius of Loyola
Where there is no love, put love -- and you will find love.
San Juan de la Cruz
1I smiled bitterly, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
Roberto Bolaño
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun
Pablo Picasso
Freedom is not an individual effort.Yours comes only when you grant others theirs
Sergio Aragonés
The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities my capacities.
José Ortega y Gasset
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.
George Santayana
There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.
Félix J. Palma
All times are beautiful for those who maintain joy within them but there is no happy or favorable time for those with disconsolate or orphaned souls.
Rosalia Castro
Un paraíso conseguido sin esfuerzo no entusiasma al creyente.
Pío Baroja
Anyone could see that this woman is living a nightmare. Except that she goes through her daily life wide awake, knowing that she could make a mistake at any moment.
Núria Añó
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?
Roberto Bolaño
La luz del pasillo iluminaba débilmente mi rostro que se reflejaba de modo fantasmal en el cristal de la ventanilla y me hacía recordar el que tuve en la infancia, el que naufragó para siempre en la despedida, como si aquel niño se hallara agazapado en algún lugar de mi interior esperando un descuido mío para emerger de nuevo en las aguas fangosas del pasado con su sonrisa feliz y sus ojos brillantes.
Elia Barceló
We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.
Javier Marías
Leave him with his God. I’m sure He’s as hard and unforgiving as Cain is. I don’t want to know about Cain’s God. If he is anything to be guided by, I’d rather be an atheist, thank you.
Olga Núñez Miret