Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We've all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we'll be sure to have some tomorrow.
We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world.
Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.
There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is, and if the book has any kind of message, I suppose that's it.
Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.
Such is our need to shower blame on some distant entity when it is we who lack the courage to face up to what is there before us.
It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.
The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.
This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.
The ear has to be educated if one wishes to appreciate musical sounds, just as the eyes must learn to distinguish the value of words.
Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'
If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.
...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.
Death ... doesn't take her eyes off us for a minute, so much so that even those who are not yet due to die feel her gaze pursuing them constantly.
I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.
anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly
Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.
Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.
I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.
We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.
Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.
. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.
For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?
Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.
People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.
...we confidently say that it's not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.
With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.
We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.
Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.
In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others.
The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?
God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.
It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.
Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.