Jorge > Jorge's Quotes

“Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself".”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.”
― Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories

“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“I suppose even a woman's hatred is a kind of love.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“The mind is the reality. You are what you think.”
― Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Irremediablemente, él nota el regusto de melancolía. De pronto los recuerdos acuden atropellándose: palabras breves como gemidos deslizándose por una piel desnuda, escorzo de líneas largas y suaves reflejadas sobre un espejo que multiplicaba el gris de afuera, en el contraluz plomizo de una ventana que, como un cuadro francés de primeros de siglo, enmarcaba palmeras mojadas, mar y lluvia.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte

“I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things.”
― Arturo Perez-Reverte

“Nadie debería irse sin dejar una Troya ardiendo a sus espaldas.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, El pintor de batallas

“Poor Wales. So far from Heaven, so close to England.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Here Be Dragons

“In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse.”
― John le Carré, Smiley's People

“Everyone gets the devil he deserves.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Club Dumas

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“There are two kind of men,' said Ka, in a didatic voice. 'The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girls eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind.”
― Shusaku Endo, Silence

“A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!”
― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory

“Je ne veux pas gagner ma vie, je l'ai.”
― Boris Vian, L'écume des jours

“Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.”
― Toni Morrison, Jazz

“I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like shit but look great.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.”
― Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier