Yoel Isaac Diaz > Yoel Isaac's Quotes

“Even annoyance was part of the pleasure we took in each other, we were that early in love.”
― Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Y comprendía, ahora, que el hombre nunca sabe para quién padece y espera. Padece y espera y trabaja para gente que nunca conocerá, y que a su vez padecerán y esperarán y trabajarán para otros que tampoco serán felices, pues el hombre ansía siempre una felicidad situada más allá de la porción que le es otorgada. Pero la grandeza del hombre está precisamente en querer mejorar lo que es. En imponerse tareas. En el reino de los cielos no hay grandeza que conquistar, puesto que allá todo es jerarquía establecida, incógnita despejada, existir sin término, imposibilidad de sacrificio, reposo y deleite. Por ello, agobiado de penas y de tareas, hermoso dentro de su miseria, capaz de amar en medio de las plagas, el hombre sólo puede hallar su grandeza, su máxima medida en el reino de este mundo.”
― Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo / Los pasos perdidos

“WHAT IT IS

It is what
it is. But
what is it?

What it is—

Some soft
tautology

whose terms
are touch

Time to give, time
to give it up. ”
― Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“and I am missing you in the way
that spreads. I'm trying

to wear my freedom like
an amulet, make it something

I'll never forget.”
― Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“...But I trust I will live
in my skin again, if life
is sweet and long.”
― Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“Afterward (or, The Bridge)

Because desire always exceeds
its object. Because the energy you gave me

feels big enough to birth wings. Because
I want you to push into the wetness

and I know it. Because of the salt
and the wind. Because everything

that is supposed to happen
will happen, is happening, or

has already happened. Because
ambivalence is more beautiful

than justice. Because my heart is
shooting ahead, and I have no choice

but to follow it. Because I want you
to be happy, with or without me.

Because of the birds fleeing the storm.
Because the harbor is permeable

and shining. Because it felt like
that last night of my life

but it wasn't. Because a web of cables
is there to catch me if I blow

sideways, and always will be. Because
I walked across the bridge and was free.”
― Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“He was a pile of American garbage and she feared she would love him forever.”
― Patrick deWitt, French Exit

“Do you ever feel," she asked, "that adulthood was thrust upon you at too young an age, and that you are still essentially a child mimicking the behaviours of the adults all around you in hopes they won't discover the meager contents of your heart?”
― Patrick deWitt, French Exit

“Frances lit a cigarette. "Do you regret not having children?"
"Never once. Never for a day. Do you regret having one?"
Frances laughed.
"I'm being serious, " said Joan.
"Oh. Well, sometimes I do, to be honest."
"But you wouldn't change him."
"Yes, I would."
"But you wouldn't change him much."
"I'd change him quite a bit."
"But you love him."
"So much that it pains me.”
― Patrick deWitt, French Exit: a Novel

“Well, for one," said Frances, "that's an extremely shitty thing to say to me. Two, the glamour passed a long time ago, and you know very well that it did. And third, three, yes, my life is riddled by cliches, but do you know what a cliche is? It's a story so fine and thrilling that it's grown old in its hopeful retelling.”
― Patrick deWitt, French Exit

“In the late afternoon the group assembled for cocktails. Without consorting about it they'd all dressed up, and the women's perfumes fought for supremacy in the living room. The sun set, candles were lit; Mme Reynard found an English dictionary among the cookbooks and proposed they play the game called Dictionary, whereby a player assigns an incorrect definition to an unknown word in hopes of fooling the other players.
She claimed the secateur was the sabateur's assistant. Malcom that costalgia was a shared reminiscence, Susan that a remotion was a lateral promotion, Frances that polonaise was an outmoded British condiment fabricated from a horse's bone marrow, Madeline that a puncheon was a contentious luncheon, and Joan that a syrt was a Syrian breath mint. Julius, whose English was not fully matured, said that unbearing was the act of "removing a bear from a peopled premises.”
― Patrick deWitt, French Exit

“Eché mi esperanza al mar:
y aún fue en el mar, mi esperanza
verde-mar...”
― Dulce María Loynaz, A Woman in Her Garden: Selected Poems

“Life on Earth is quite a bargain. Dreams, for one, don’t charge admission. Illusions are costly only when lost.”
― Wisława Szymborska, Here

“You want to know what weakness is? Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“¿Qué vas a leer?
Si tienes suerte, podrás vivir unos ochenta años.
De los cuales, si comenzaste a leer a los seis, tendrás setenta y cuatro de vida útil como lector.
Si lees sin parar un libro por semana durante esos setenta y cuatro años completos, sin fallar, a lo largo de tu vida puedes leer 3848 títulos.
No son muchos...
¿Ya escogiste qué vas a leer?”
― Benito Taibo, Desde mi muro

“no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“El dictador necesita multitudes vivientes, pero también muchedumbres de cadáveres.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“Robert Bowman, who had flown 101 combat missions in Vietnam, and then had become a Catholic bishop, commented on the terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter he wrote about the roots of terrorism: We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism. . . . Instead of sending our sons and daughters around the world to kill Arabs so we can have the oil under their sand we should send them to rebuild their infrastructure, supply clean water, and feed starving children. In short, we should do good instead of evil. Who would try to stop us? Who would hate us? Who would want to bomb us? That is the truth the American people need to hear.”
― Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

“The cultural obsession with purity originates in the evolutionary struggle to avoid pollution. All animals are torn between the need to try new food and the fear of being poisoned. Evolution therefore equipped animals with both curiosity and the capacity to feel disgust on coming into contact with something toxic or otherwise dangerous. Politicians and prophets have learned how to manipulate these disgust mechanisms.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“There is no remedy for death—or birth—except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall.”
― Jim Crace, Being Dead