Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“El diablo no es el príncipe de la materia, el diablo es la arrogancia del espíritu, la fe sin sonrisa, la verdad jamás tocada por la duda.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Si utilizara el ingenio que los buenos espíritus me dieron, entonces diría que esta dama no puede existir, pues ¿qué hombre en su sano juicio llamaría al sueño realidad? Sin embargo yo preferiría no ser cuerdo y prestar crédito a mis ojos hechizados”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“My ambition is handicapped by laziness”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.”
― William Styron, Conversations with William Styron

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don’t move until you’ve reached page fifty. Until you’ve buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”
― Carol Shields, The Republic of Love

“Vendrán las iguanas vivas a morder a los hombres que no sueñan”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“During a party, Luis Buñuel, seduced by Carrington’s beauty and emboldened by the notion that she had transcended all bourgeois morality, proposed (with his characteristic bluntness) that she become his mistress. Without even waiting for her answer, he gave her the key to the secret studio that he used as a love nest and told her to meet him at three o’clock the next afternoon. Early the next morning, Leonora went to visit the place alone. She found it tasteless: It looked exactly like a motel room. Taking advantage of the fact that she was in her menstrual period, she covered her hands with blood and used them to make bloody handprints all over the walls in order to provide a bit of decoration for that anonymous, impersonal room. Buñuel never spoke to her again.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky: The Creator of El Topo

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“¿Y para qué leer? ¿Y para qué escribir? Después de leer cien, mil, diez mil libros en la vida, ¿qué se ha leído? Nada. Decir: yo sólo sé que no he leído nada, después de leer miles de libros, no es un acto de fingida modestia: es rigurosamente exacto, hasta la primera decimal de cero por ciento. Pero ¿no es quizá eso, exactamente, socráticamente, lo que los muchos libros deberían enseñarnos? Ser ignorantes a sabiendas, con plena aceptación. Dejar de ser ignorantes, para llegar a ser ignorantes inteligentes. [...] Quizá, por eso, la medida de la lectura no debe ser el número de libros leídos, sino el estado en que nos dejan.
¿Qué demonios importa si uno es culto, está al día o ha leído todos los libros? Lo que importa es cómo se anda, cómo se ve, cómo se actúa, después de leer. Si la calle y las nubes y la existencia de los otros tienen algo que decirnos. Si leer nos hace, físicamente, más reales.”
― Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

“Como todo poseedor de una biblioteca, Aureliano se sabía culpable de no conocerla hasta el fin”
― Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph

“Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We'll wander back and home to bed.
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“El dolor (aquello contra lo cual escribo) y la angustia (durante la cual escribo)... ¿son acaso la Musa?”
― Emiliano González, Los sueños de la bella durmiente

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”
― Jeanette Winterson