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There was no one among her people who had ever broken her earless, careless solitude of mind; having no age-mates, and by choice also, she had always been quite alone, going her own way and caring little for any person. But now as the world had turned gray and nothing held any promise beyond death, now as she first felt fear, she had met him, the dark figure near the tower rock over the sea, and had heard a voice....

Sining Path militants had to be convinced of two things: the need to kill in a systematic and depersonalized way as part of an agreed-upon strategy; and, as a necessary premise, not just the willingness but the expectation of giving up their own lives. This second concept is known as "the quota."

Anna [Gould] was one of those individuals who find happiness in a mental orgy of suffering. She loved to hear unpleasant things, to meditate on them, and to magnify them exceedingly. She would defend me and my misdoings to others, but she would never defend them to herself. Deep in her soul was the implanted idea that all Frenchmen were bad!

I was unfavourably impressed by my first sight of New York, and the horrible Statue of Liberty might have justified Mme. Roland's historic exclamation: "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" The city itself gave me the idea of extreme disproportion, and the skyscrapers on either side of the Hudson River seemed to have been built by a race of Titans.

At 9:27 in the morning of March 18th, in the seventh month of her confinement, Joyce Fante fell through the kitchen floor of our house. The sheer weight of her ... plus the condition of the woodwork, came to a shuddering climax as the termite-infested floorboards collapsed beneath the tearing linoleum and the woman with the big bump sank to the ground three feet below.

Straight and still stood the daughter of the Angyar in the white, blank light of the lamps; her windsteed crouched beside her, flicking the tip of his striped tail, his great folded wings stirring again and again with the checked impulse to fly. In the tunnel behind Semley the eight Claymen squatted on their hams, muttering to one another in their deep voices, in their own tongue.

If I were to attempt to spell out in a sentence the single lethal factor at the root of declining or lost civilizations up to the present, I would be forced to say adaptability. I would have to remark, paradoxically, that the magnificent specialization of gray matter which has opened to us all the climates of the earth ... has this one flaw: it is too adaptable.

"But I do love the world," I whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room. "I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again.... I love the lost ones, the failures of the world."

It has been said that great art is the night bthought of man. It may emerge without warning from the depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farthest reaches of void space.

Though I visit the Andes out of curiosity, I will never love them. They are too brutal, too vast, too remote. They have lifted me to frightful agony of body and soul, to grand awe, but I always want to escape quickly.

It was dark now and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn' thinking of Daisy and gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement....

Hume: Epicurus' old questions are yet unanswered. Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

Maigret felt weighted down, discouraged, a little sad. This was a commonplace thing, a sordid crime such as happened almost every week, a lonely old woman robbed and murdered by a boy who was not yet twenty. The only difference was that, in this case, Théo Stiernet had killed his own grandmother.

People need landmarks. They tell us where we are, where we've been, where we want to go. And if you live in one place long enough, you begin to acquire quite a few of them.

There were even provinces where, when the natives alleged they were unable to pay their tribute, the Inca ordered that each inhabitant should be obliged to turn in every four months a large quill full of live lice, which was the Inca's way of teaching and accustoming them to pay tribute.

Is it actually possible that a culture could develop a turbine-powered, airborne craft and not have, say, a written language? Because, according to the scuttlebutt at TD, there were no letters, signs or figures anywhere on the craft, and they certainly scrutinized it thoroughly for that.

I'm not surprised that reality contradicts these rumors. Information in this country has ceased to be objective and has become pure fantasy—in newspapers, radio, television, and ordinary conversation. "To report" among us now means either to interpret reality according to our desires or fears, or to say simply what is convenient.

It wasn't the Amazonian flatlands but an undulating forest, the brow of a mountainous forest, with slopes, gulches, narrow passes, defiles, ideal pitfalls where ambushes could be set up, where the enemy's communications could be cut, where he could be dizzied, confused, driven mad, where he could be attacked when he least expected it....

But have you ever thought how difficult it is to be corrupted in this country of ours? You have to have opportunities. Most people are honest because they have no choice, don't you think? Did you ever wonder how Mayta would have reacted if he'd been given a chance to be corrupted?

In traditional crime fiction every detective with any self-respect has an unfailing nose for when people are lying. It's bullshit! Human nature is a vast impenetrable forest which no one can know in its entirety. Not even a mother knows her child's deepest secrets.

[Villacastin] was wandering through a woods in Panama when a monkey fetched him such a fierce blow with a stone from the top of a tree that it made him spit out four teeth. Villacastin recovered in a moment, drew his crossbow, and managed to kill the monkey that had left him so badly disfigured for life.

Old women recount that when the owner of the estate died, his corpse disappeared, for of a certainty it did not receive a church burial, having been carried off by the one whio appears in paintings at the foot of Saint Michael, and who in the wee hours traveled through the streets of Lima in a coach afire with infernal flames and drawn by a team of four diabolical horses abreast.

You see that everything is fallacious, or rather that there is nothing false and nothing true, everything is a matter of convention. Adopt the convention that will get you the best reception in society. Now the rabble is patriotic and will always defile that side of the question: become an aristocrat like your relatives, and we'll find some means to introduce you to influential young ladies in Paris.

The celebrated Legendre, a geometrician of the first rank, on receiving the Cross of the Legion of Honour, fastened it to his coat, looked at himself in the glass and jumped for joy. The room was low, he hit the ceiling with his head and fell down half dead. What a worthy death this would have been for this successor of Archimedes!

Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu: I felt infinitely small in the centre of that navel of rocks, the navel of a deserted world, proud, towering high, to which I somehow belonged. I felt that my own hands had labored there at some remote point in time, digging furrows, polishing the rocks.... I had found the principles of faith I needed to continue my poetry.

[T]he tragedy of South America, the tragedy of the Andes, the tragedy not just of the Incas, the Indians and the Andean poor, but also the tragedy that ultimately engulfed Pizarro, Bolivar, Che Guevara, and almost all the other great adventurers and idealists who have been ensnared by this wonderful and terrible continent.

All my unhappiness could be summed up in a couple of phrases: I was never allowed to speak to a child of my own age, and my relatives, who were very bored because of their segregation from all society, honoured me with their continuous attention.

Another time my uncle was kind enough to take me to the Caravan of Cairo (he found me rather in the way of his maneuvers with the ladies, and I was well aware of this). I was beside myself with excitement over the camels. he Infanta of Zamora, in which a poltroon or a cook sang an arietta wearing a helmet with a rat for a crest, made me wild with delight.

Elephants -- now those are creatures which make me uneasy still. I rarely encounter one. Even when my children were young, I avoided zoos, circuses, any place an elephant might be sighted. I feared to have that sad, shrewd eye turned on me, taking my measure and finding it wanting.

Since the day of the peace celebrations, the twins' world had contracted to a few square miles, bounded on one side by Maesyfelin Chapel and on the other by the Black Hill.... Deliberately, as if reaching back to the innocence of early childhood, they turned away from the modern age.