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Bolivar: "You say that history will say great things about me. I believe it will say nothing was greater than my renunciation of power and my absolute dedication to the arms tha could save the government and the country. History will say, Bolivar took over the government to free his countrymen, and when they were free he left them so that they would be ruled by law and not his will.'"

It puzzled him how people managed to live in such a crooked country as Europe. He wondered what the shape of the people might be who lived in places where the outline narrowed as in a cape, and how they managed to escape being strangled by the contour of their land.

[C]hildren look with more searching gaze than adults. My opinion is, that where circumstances favour, where the heart is deep, where humility and tenderness exist in strength, where the situation is favourable as to solitude and as to genial feelings, children have a specific power of contemplating the truth, which departs as they enter the world.

No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude.

I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with a lady’s fan.

Heavens! What a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes:—this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.

As in the Soviet past, bright new futures were elusive. Which didn't mean they wouldn't come, only that some cost was involved. And in these infant days of Slav capitalism, anything good—bright future included—was extremely pricey.

Race consciousness was acute and neighbors made it their business to know each other's origins. The whites dominated the bureaucracy, law, the Church, land and the wholesale trade, but they were not a homogeneous group. They consisted of peninsular Spaniards, Venezuelan creoles—comprising a small number of leading families, but many more with race mixture in their ancestry and 'passing' for whites....

I once ignited a fierce online debate with the simple question of whether a sentence should have two spaces after each period, or just one. It turns out, the commonly held practice today is just one—though those of us who took typing in high school (yes, typing) are so accustomed to putting two spaces after a period as a concession to courier font that old habits are hard to break.

Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world's breathing....

"It's not a bad thing if one is confronted with such contretemps," he [Pedro Camacho] said, sipping his first spoonful of consommé. "Suffering is a good teacher."

A stomach that empties itself promptly and totally is the twin of a clear mind and an upright soul. A sluggish, lazy, avaricious stomach, on the other hand, engenders bad thoughts, sours the character, fosters complexes and perverted sexual appetites, and gives rise to criminal tendencies, a need to take out on others one's own excremental tortures.

Hence, when writing stories, it was important that contrast, not continuity, be the ruling principle of composition: the complete change of place, milieu, mood, subject, and characters reinforced the exhilarating sensation that one was starting afresh. Moreover, cups of mint-and-verbena tea were helpful: they cleared one's synapses, and one's imagination was grateful.

Such feelings were in glaring contrast with the self-confidence and recklessness of my father. My father, the tubercular artist, whose beautiful hands were remade into parchment to shade the light. My father, the sarving artist who believed that everything always ends in failure, and so one must make of failure an occasion.

People always assume that to improvise is to act without thinking. But if you do something on an impulse, or because you feel like it, or just like that, without knowing why, it's still YOU doing it, and you have a history that has led to that particular point in your life, so it's not really a thoughtless act, far from it....

Dr. Czissar was a plump, middle-aged man of rather more than medium height, with a round, pale face and a pair of sad brown eyes, magnified to cow-like proportions by a pair of thick pebble glasses.

When they went back into the exercise room, Coco ... was instructing Blacky Humilla, pointing to his stomach and preaching this axiom of philosophy to him: "When you eat, when you work, when you're at the movies, when you're humping your wife, when you're having a drink, at every moment in your life, and, if possible, even in your coffin, suck in your gut!"

We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time when we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it.

Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined -- sifted. But here the whole thing is cut and dried. No, my friend, this evidence has been very cleverly manufactured -- so cleverly that it has defeated its own ends.

By contrast with the skill and ingenuity the Incas devoted to their means of communication and methods of military deployment, the actual weapons jused by their armies did not constitute any advance over those of other Andean peoples and certainly did not impress the Spaniards, who marvelled at their roads and buildings.

Claude Lev-Strauss: "No one can even write a history of the French Revolution; all the historian can do is to reconstruct a myth based on his own selection of fact. History is never, therefore, history but 'history for ...'"

The Nazca lines, henceforth treated as a new wonder of the American Ancient World, have featured in countless magazines, in worldwide television shows, and in many books, including works on the occult.

Bismarck's primary loyalty also was to Prussia and its dynasty, the Hohenzollerns, not to the German national idea.... Bismarck did not want to unify Germany so much as he wanted to "Prussianize" it.

And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.

What more do I need? On the street peple great me with a smile.... People share their stories with me; they tell me about their lives, about their sorrows. Ivan has told me the story of the night crossing of the Araks—and this man I had thought of as cruel had wept.

One must understand what it means to be born at the fot of a volcano. Arequipa is less a city than a living temple to El Misti, that imposing mass of rock rising behind the cathedral. Men invoke its name to describe what is right. What does a volcano do to a man but impress upon him the need to dream on a grand scale?

In a word, as Robur had said, the "Albatross," by using the whole force of her screws, could make the tour of the globe in two hundred hours, or less than eight days.

The grandiose illusion of the exile is that they are all back home, your enemies and your friends, voyeurs all, watching you. Everything has gained importance because you are away. Back home, your routines were only that. Here, they are portentous, significant. They have the weight of discovery. Can they see me? In this city, this cathedral? In this New York gallery?

When Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles look back on their histories, they share a sense of tragedy related to those events leading up to the loss of "national freedom," and for the Hungarians and the Poles, this feeling of loss is often intensified by reminiscences about extensive territories lost as well.

In Lima dying is the local sport. hose who die in phantasmagoric fashion, violently, spectacularly, are celebrated in the fifty-cent papers beneath appropriately gory headlines: DRIVER GETS MELON BURST or NARCO SHOOTOUT, BYSTANDERS EAT LEAD.