Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 15

It is one thing to praise discipline, and another to submit to it.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I tried sex once with a woman and it was Gala. It was overated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Frederico Garcia Lorca. It was very painful.
Salvador Dalí
A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techniques and the ars combinatoria for fabricating machines. It is a knowledge which has scarcely anything to do with comprehension.
José Ortega y Gasset
We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.
Javier Marías
Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
One grey hair appeared on my headI plucked it out with my hand.It answered me: "You have prevailed against me alone -What will you do when my army comes after me?
Yehuda HaLevi
Good things when short are twice as good.
Baltasar Gracián
My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.
Manel Loureiro
Fictions exist because of this fact. Because we have only one life, and our desires and fantasies demand a thousand lives. Because the abyss between what we are and what we would like to be has to be bridged somehow. That was why fictions were born: so that, through living this vicarious, transient, precarious, but also passionate and fascinating life that fiction transports us to, we can incorporate the impossible into the possible and our existence can be both reality and unreality, history and fable, concrete life and marvellous adventure.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking.
Antonio Machado
O how gently and how lovingly dost thou lie awake in the depth and centre of my soul, where thou in secret and in silence alone, as its sole Lord, abidest, not only as in Thine own house or in Thine own chamber, but also as within my own bosom, in close and intimate union.
San Juan de la Cruz
-Do you think it's dirty money?-All money is dirty. If it were clean nobody would want it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The problem nowadays is that children have become too much the center of attention. Their parents, their families, everybody around them feels a need to put them on a pedestal. So much effort is invested in boosting their self-esteem that they are made to feel special in and of themselves, without having done anything.
Rafael Nadal
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Roberto Bolaño
there are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?
Javier Marías
I don't see what my arse has to do with enchantings!
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil.
St. Dominic
Over time, loneliness gets inside you and doesn't go away.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.
Olga Núñez Miret
Se puede vivir sin leer, es cierto: pero también se puede vivir sin amar: el argumento hace aguas como una balsa capitaneada por ratas... Sólo quien ha estado enamorado sabe lo que el amor regala y quita: sólo quien ha leído sabe si la vida merece la pena de ser vivida sin la conciencia de aquellos hombres y mujeres que nos han escrito mil veces antes de que naciéramos. Y que nadie se sonría ante estas líneas. Por una vez, y sin que sirva de precedente, han sido escritas sólo desde la emoción.
Ricardo Menéndez Salmón
It requires as much caution to tell the truth as to conceal it.
Baltasar Gracián
Until death it is all life
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present. Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the twentieth century.
Manolo Blahnik
People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.
Javier Marías
Do not show your wounded finger for everything will knock up against it.
Baltasar Gracián
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the body under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.
Roberto Bolaño
Me pregunté si no habría personas destinadas a encontrarse fuera cuáles fueran las decisiones que tomasen, si esa leyenda que hablaba de un hilo rojo que conecta a dos almas gemelas no sería verdad.
Victoria Vilchez
The dictatorship is like an aria that never becomes an opera.
Emilia Pardo Bazán
Reading is more important than writing.
Roberto Bolaño
...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.
Javier Marías
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Roberto Bolaño
Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently.
Félix J. Palma
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Man would be "otherwise." That's the essence of the specifically human.
Antonio Machado
A life without memory is no life at all
Luis Buñuel
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.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
George Santayana
That which enters the mind through reason can be corrected. That which is admitted through faith hardly ever.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do.
Félix J. Palma
Honor, vengeance, that rigorous religion, those punctilicious codes of conduct - how to explain their existence here, at the end of the world, among people who possessed nothing but the rags and the lice they had on them?
Mario Vargas Llosa
A wise man’s questions contain half the answer.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Please write an ending where the Martians are defeated. Don't take away your readers' hope.
Félix J. Palma
Cunning grows in deceit at seeing itself discovered, and tries to deceive with truth itself.
Baltasar Gracián
As he took them in his arms, the crying of the babies permeated the night like a trail of blood calling out to a predator.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
Remember that there are two kinds of beauty: one of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul displays its radiance in intelligence, in chastity, in good conduct, in generosity, and in good breeding, and all these qualities may exist in an ugly man. And when we focus our attention upon that beauty, not upon the physical, love generally arises with great violence and intensity. I am well aware that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of worth not to be a monster for him to be dearly loved, provided he has those spiritual endowments I have spoken of.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio
El Sueno de la razon produce monstrous. (The sleep of reason breeds monsters)
Francisco de Goya
I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week."Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself."Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.
Roberto Bolaño
Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
1My father says a hunch is your brain’s way of taking a short cut to the truth,’ replied Max.‘He’s a wise man, your father. What else does he say?’‘That the more you try to hide from the truth, the quicker it finds you.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
They can expect nothing but their labor for their pains.
Miguel de Cervantes
Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana