Myself with Others Quotes

“There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“All truth is double, and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Language is a shared and sharing part of a culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“How to accept the diversity and mutilation of the world, while retaining the minds power for analogy and unity, so this changing world shall not become meaningless?”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“The sum of all spaces can only be read by one man who is many men, but it could only be written by one writer who was all writers, and his work . . . could only be one work: one vast narrative in which space has been seen and defeated.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. . . . Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“As there was no rupture between his reading of the books and his faith in what they said, so now there is no divorce between the acts and the words of his adventures. Because assimilated to Don Quixote, we read it but do not see it, we shall never know what it is that the goodly gentleman puts on his head: the fabled helm of Mambrino, or a vulgar barber's basin. The first doubt assails us: is Quixote right, has he discovered the legendary helmet where everyone else, blind and ignorant, sees only the basin?”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“in a tiny corner saved for his bed among the Piranesi-like perspective of volume piled upon volume.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Fraternally shall be convulsive, or it shall not be; fraternity cannot be when it's is but a disguise for our good conscience - repugnant, condescending, philanthropic.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays