Terra Nostra Quotes

“Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“... is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young?
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“heresiarch”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“The mystery of other individuals, señor caballero, is ordinarily grief we neither share nor understand.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“Gold is the excrement of the gods.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“You awakened a philosopher today, Guzmán. I prefer to maintain my illusions.” “As El Señor wishes. But time is always a disappointment; foreseen, it promises us only the certainty of death; recaptured, it makes a mockery of freedom.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“First of all, señor caballero, I shall tell you this: long centuries of exhortation have taught us that we can trust only in our five senses. Ideas flourish and swiftly fade, memories are lost, hopes are never fulfilled, sentiments are inconstant. The senses of smell, touch, hearing, sight, and taste are the only sure proofs of our existence and of the reflected reality of the world.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“It is true that every mountain has four faces, and one tends to know but one.
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“But reason... tells us that merely with repetition the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and only briefly abandoned, what had once passed for a common and ordinary occurrence becomes a portent:”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man's pleasure, not for his mortification.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“My design, the ancient man said, sucking his lips, is not to win battles with words but to convince the head and the heart of man that we must accept the world as it is, and peacefully; the world we live in is well ordered and offers rewarding riches to those who accept their place in it without protest.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra