Juan Ocampo > Juan's Quotes

“We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.”
― Georges Simenon

“It just happened. As though a moment comes when it's both necessary and natural to make a decision that has long since been made. ”
― Georges Simenon

“Elegimos el ejemplar más exótico, nos enamoramos de su libertad y empezamos a construirle una jaula”
― José Sbarra, Plástico cruel

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow.”
― Djuna Barnes

“No critiques a tus enemigos que a lo mejor aprenden.”
― Juan Goytisolo

“Cada época lee a sus clásicos de distinta manera. El lector encuentra en ellos los contenidos que le permiten aclarar su presente, resolver sus dilemas, vislumbrar con mayor claridad sus objetivos. Una gran obra trascenderá siempre las intenciones de su autor y las limitaciones de su tiempo”
― Sergio Pitol, Soñar la realidad

“Los mejores escritores tienen una única obra, que las escriben en veinticinco libros o lo que vos quieras, pero, es una sola obra.”
― Alberto Laiseca

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“The shortest horror story:

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
― Frederic Brown

“THERE IS A LOVELY LITTLE horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood—the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along:

I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me, then there isn't any justice.

A voice behind him said, “There isn't.”
― Fredric Brown

“There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:
'The last man on Earth sat along in a room. There was a knock at the door…'
Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn't in the story at all; it's in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door. Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.”
― Fredric Brown, Space on My Hands

“I need, therefore I imagine.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.”
― Carlos Fuentes

“No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.”
― David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Esta rosa fue testigo:
¡todo en tu ser sonreía!
Todo cuanto yo soñé
de ti, lo tuve conmigo...
Esta rosa fue testigo.”
― León de Greiff, Obra poética

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
― Will Durant

“When the sun was rising I doubted its value, as it set I lamented its loss.”
― Evan Dara, The Easy Chain

“How glorious it is – and also how painful – to be an exception. ”
― Alfred de Musset

“Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives”
― Alfred De Musset

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera

“Whenever I don’t know whether to fight or not, I fight.”
― Emily Murphy