Quotes by Spanish Authors - Page 19

He was waiting for me at the best table in the room, toying with a glass of white wine and listening to the pianist who was playing a piece by Granados with velvet fingers.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
One of the most damaging myths of our time is that poor countries live in poverty because of a conspiracy of the rich countries, who arrange things so as to keep them underdeveloped, in order to exploit them.
Mario Vargas Llosa
...if the verses are for a literary competition, your grace should try to win second place; first is always won through favor or because of the high estate of the person, second is won because of pure justice, and by this calculation third becomes second, and the first becomes third...
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
Federico García Lorca
I do not insist," answered Don Quixote, "that this is a full adventure, but it is the beginning of one, for this is the way adventures begin.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
I do not seek. I find.
Pablo Picasso
Yo me salgo desnudo a la calle,maduro de versos perdidos.I step naked into the streetripe with lost poems.
Federico García Lorca
For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.
Maimonides
As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure Object of Desire in Seville and I suddenly found myself telling Fernando Rey, at the end of a scene, to pick up a big sack filled with tools lying on a bench, sling it over his shoulder, and walk away. The action was completely irrational, yet it seemed absolutely right to me. Still, I was worried about it, so I shot two versions of the scene: one with the sack, one without. But during the rushes the following day, the whole crew agreed that the scene was much better with the sack. Why? I can't explain it, and I don't enjoy rummaging around in the cliches of psychoanalysis.
Luis Buñuel
... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Even knowledge has to be in fashion and where it is not it is wise to affect ignorance.
Baltasar Gracián
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".
Enrique Vila-Matas
Harness the imagination: Sometimes curbing her, sometimes giving her rein, for she is the whole of happiness. She sets to rights even the understanding. She sinks to tyranny, not satisfied with mere faith, but demanding works. Thus she becomes the mistress of life itself. She does so with pleasure or with pain, according to the nonsense presented. She makes people contented or discontented with themselves. By dangling before some nothing but the specter of their eternal suffering, she becomes the scourge of these fools. To others she shows nothing but fortune and romance, while merrily laughing. Of all this she is capable if not held in check by the wisest of wills.
Baltasar Gracián
Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.
Félix J. Palma
That was the problem with modern day witches , thought Corso : they didn't have any secrets . Everything was out in the open , you could read all about them in any Who's Who or gossip column . Baronesses or not , they had become predictable , vulgar . Torquemada would have been bored to death by it all .
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.
Felix Alba-Juez
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
José Ortega y Gasset
Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.
José Ortega y Gasset
Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word never to withdraw one.
Baltasar Gracián
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.
Roberto Bolaño
Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
Javier Marías
You don't look well," he pronounced."Indigestion," I replied."From what?""Reality.""Join the queue.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The passion of the collector when confronted with a rare item, the enthusiasm of a hunter who sees a fine, handsome beast, can give us no idea of the tremendous love of clothes in some women.
Benito Pérez Galdós
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
Salvador Dalí
God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso
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 (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Roberto Bolaño
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Roberto Bolaño
When those who name dead people have gone, there just remains the calmness of foreign cemeteries, in which nothing appears familiar and nothing frightens you.
Ray Loriga
I don't believe in God, I only believe in Al Pacino, and that's the truth.
Javier Bardem
Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.
José Ortega y Gasset
For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don't know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can't be sure: el enamoramiento--the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, although not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ... We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I've experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything else. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it's important to distinguish between the two things, they're easily confused, but they're not the same ... It's very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness.
Javier Marías
You don't win a game by hitting the ball out of the court.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone
Federico García Lorca
Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.
Antonio Machado
I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism.
George Santayana
You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears.
Roberto Bolaño
The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for all beings.As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.
Juan Mascaró
Never trust anyone Daniel, especially the people you admire
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
When love is not madness it is not love.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca
The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason , so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
We always fall in love with a story, not a name or a body but what is inscribed in the man.
Susana Fortes
It is curious that the human mind could blindly accept an infinite speed but had reservations to accept a finite one, simply because it was too large!
Felix Alba-Juez
This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.
Salvador Dalí