The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll Quotes

“Everything changed when I met the girl. She penetrated a corner of my soul that had been kept sealed and even I didn't know was there. With her gestures, the scent of her skin, her sudden, intense glances that filled me with overwhelming tenderness, with her dependence that was a kind of unthinking, absolute acceptance, she could rescue me instantly from my confusions and obsessions, my discouragement and failure, or my simple daily routine, and leave me inside a radiant circle made of throbbing energy and powerful certainty, like the effects of an unknown drug that produces unconditional happiness.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“Life always holds in store surprises that are more complex and unforeseeable than any dream, and the secret is to let them come and not block them with castles in the air.”
― Alvaro Mutis, Die Abenteuer und Irrfahrten des Gaviero Maqroll : die sieben Maqroll-Romane

“Weather is a purely personal matter. There is no such thing as a climate that is cold or hot, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. People take it upon themselves to create a fantasy in their imagination and call it weather. There's only one climate in the world, but the message that nature sends is interpreted according to strictly personal, non-transferable rules.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“Since a good part of my life has been wasted dealing with fools just like them, it's not worry I feel but weariness as I watch the approach of one more episode in the old, tired story of men who try to beat life, the smart ones who think they know it all and die with a look of surprise on their faces: at the final moment they always see the truth - they never really understood anything, never held anything in their hands. An old story, old and boring.”
― Alvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“He looked like a homeless convalescent in his light blue T-shirt that had known better days, his navy-blue seaman’s jacket with the black leather buttons, purchased at some second-hand clothing store in a Baltic port, and the rebellious, grayying locks of his unconquerable hair escaping at the sides of his black sailor’s cap. His slightly protruding eyes had the wary look of a man who has seen more than humans are permitted to see, and he carried his eternal duffel bag, with two changes of clothing as threadbare as those he was wearing, a few talismans, each a reservoir of memories of indelible sentiments or miraculous rescues from unspeakable dangers, and the three or four books that always accompanied him.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“Meditar el tiempo, tratar de saber si el pasado y el futuro son válidos y si en verdad existen, nos lleva a un laberinto que, por familiar, no es menos indescifrable. Cada día somos otro, pero siempre olvidamos que igual sucede con nuestros semejantes. En esto tal vez consista lo que los hombres llaman soledad. O es así, o se trata de una solemne imbecilidad.”
― Álvaro Mutis, Empresas y Tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero

“He was a hostage of the void”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“Life with Ilona was invariably lived on two levels, or rather in two simultaneous and parallel directions. On the one hand, your feet were always on the ground, you were always intelligently but not obsessively alert to what each day offered in response to the routine question of surviving. On the other hand, imagination and unbounded fantasy suggested a spontaneous and unexpected sequence of scenarios that were always aimed at the radical subversion of every law ever written or established. This was a permanent, organic, rigorous subversion that never permitted travel on the beaten path, the road preferred by most people, the traditional patterns that offer protection to those whom Ilona, without emphasis or pride but without any concessions either, would call "the others.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“So many moments of irritating, wearisome disgust are returned to us years later by memory as splendidly happy episodes. Nostalgia is the lie that speeds our approach to death.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“We said it really wasn’t very late, that we were listening to him with growing interest. The bottle of bourbon was empty. I brought another, along with more ice, and we asked the Gaviero to continue his story. On summer nights in California, time stretches like an elastic, compliant material, perfect for hearing the confidences of someone who had a store of tales that could lead us from one marvel to another until dawn.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“The cats of Istanbul,” explained the Gaviero, “possess absolute wisdom. They exercise complete control over the life of the city, but they are so prudent and secretive that the inhabitants are still not aware of the fact.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“They never found ore no matter how deep they dug or how many branches they made off the main tunnels. And I, a seaman for whom ports were mere pretexts for transient loves and brothel fights, who can still feel in my bones the sway of the crow’s nest when I climbed to the top to watch the horizon and give storm warnigs, to call out sightings of coastlines and pods of whales and dizzying schools of fish that approached the ship like a drunken mob, here I am, visiting the cool darkness of these labyrinths where a wind that is often warm and damp carries voices, laments, the unending, relentless toil of insects, the fluttering wings of dark butterflies, the screech of a bird lost in the depths of the mine shafts.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“I spent the strangest days of my life in Amirbar. In Amirbar I left shreds of my soul and most of the energy that fired my youth. Perhaps I came down from there more serene, I don’t know, but I was everlastingly weary too. What happened to me since then has been a matter of simply surviving each day’s difficulties. Trivialities. Not even the ocean could give back to me my vocation for dreaming with my eyes open: I used that up in Amirbar and received nothing in return.”
― Álvaro Mutis, The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

“Son sueños que preludian la felicidad y de los que se desprende una particular energía, una como anticipación de la dicha, efímera, es cierto, y que de inmediato se transforma en el inevitable clima de derrota que me es familiar. Pero basta esa ráfaga que apenas permanece y que me lleva a prever días mejores, para sostenerme en el caótico derrumbe de proyectos y desastradas aventuras que es mi vida. Sueño que participo en un momento histórico, en una encrucijada del destino de las naciones y que contribuyo, en el instante crítico, con una opinión, un consejo que cambia por completo el curso de los hechos. Es tan decisiva, en el sueño, mi participación y tan deslumbrante y justa la solución que aporto, que de ella mana esa suerte de confianza en mis poderes que barre las sombras y me encamina hacia un disfrute de mi propia plenitud, con tal intensidad que, cuando despierto, perdura por varios días su fuerza restauradora.”
― Álvaro Mutis, Empresas y Tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero