There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.
...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
But truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.
Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we're naked.
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.
If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?
En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.
Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.
In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.
but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time
blindness is a private matter between a person and the eyes with which he or she was born.
The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
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?
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.
In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
Don't be afraid, the darkness you're in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin, I bet you've never thought of that, you carry a darkness about with you all the time and that doesn't frighten you...my dear chap, you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside
Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow.
The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.
Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?
There is relationship between sight and touch, something about eyes being able to see through the fingers touching the clay, about fingers being able to feel what the eyes are seeing without the fingers actually touching it.
I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.
. . . 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.
I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.
A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
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.
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
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.
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.
We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.
Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.
Each day is a little bit of history
I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
Your questions are false if you already know the answer.
Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
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?
The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.
There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.
... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.
I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
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 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.
Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.
Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.
Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain... It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see... That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed.
The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.
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.
Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.
In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.
We are finally living in Plato's cave, if we consider how those who were imprisoned within the cave - who could do nothing but watch those shadows passing on the back wall - were convinced that those shadows were their one and only reality. I see a profound similarity to all this in the epoch we're now living in. We no longer live simply through images: we live through images that don't even exist, which are the result not of physical projection but of pure virtuality.
Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.
Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.
Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.
Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.
We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness
For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.
The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.
all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
That it's possible not to see a lie even when it's in front of us.
The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.
There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.
...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying.
If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.
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.
Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else matters.
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...
We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.
Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.
The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.
The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory.
Death is the inventor of God.
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.
That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'
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.
There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.
Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins.
just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.
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.
Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.
when you are old and realize that time is running out, you start imagining that you have the cure for all the ills of the world in your hand, and get frustrated because no one pays you any attention.
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.
Jeronimo, my grandfather, swine-herder and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again. To truly appreciate life we must remember that nothing lasts for ever and take nothing we enjoy for granted. In so doing we stay grateful and happy for all our good fortune.
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.
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 would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.
The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
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.
Every second that passes is like a door that opens to allow in what has not yet happened, what we call the future, but, to challenge the contradictory nature of what we have just said, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the future is just an immense void, that the future is just the time on which the eternal present feeds.
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?
Often when you ask for one thing you receive another, this is the mysterious thing about prayer, we address them to heaven with some private intention, but they choose their own path, sometimes they delay, allowing other prayers to overtake them, frequently they overlap and become hybrid prayers of dubious origin, which quarrel and argue among themselves.
I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?
A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.
Sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another.
A stomach accustomed to hunger is satisfied with very little.
