Sepharad Quotes

“Eres cada una de las personas diversas que has sido y también las que imaginabas que serías, y cada una de las que nunca fuiste, y las que deseabas fervorosamente ser y ahora agradeces no haber sido.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (Biblioteca Breve)

“Nunca soy más yo mismo que cuando guardo silencio y escucho, cuando dejo a un lado mi fatigosa identidad y mi propia memoria para concentrarme del todo en el acto de escuchar, de ser plenamente habitado por las experiencias y los recuerdos de otros.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (Biblioteca Breve)

“All human miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Pero los dos, al ser detenidos, al ser confrontados con la elección de una identidad, eligieron declararse judíos, unirse al número de las víctimas absolutas, los que eran condenados no por sus actos ni por sus palabras, no por profesar una religión o una ideología, no por arrojar octavillas que no iban a influir sobre nadie ni por echarse al monte sin ropas ni calzado de invierno y sin más armas que una pistolilla ridícula, sino por el simple hecho de haber nacido.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (Biblioteca Breve)

“Her voice is almost as young as her eyes, unrelated to the age inscribed on her features and to the American carelessness of her clothes.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“I kept Letters to Milena in a desk drawer, and sometimes I carried the book in a pocket to read on the bus. It nourished my love for the absent beloved, and for the failed or impossible loves I had learned of through films and books.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Dispensing hand of happiness, Kafka writes of Milena’s hand.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“learned in Pascal that men never live in the present, only in their memory of the past or in their desire or fear of the future, and that all our miseries outlast us because we are not able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“In a letter Kafka wrote, I recognized the symptoms of my illness: ennui.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“The newspaper tells of the laws of racial purity newly promulgated in Nuremberg, and you read that you are a Jew and destined to extermination.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Margarete Buber-Neumann returned only to be sent not to freedom but to the German camp of Ravensbrück.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Two identities were offered to Jean Améry when he was stopped by the Gestapo, when he was interrogated and then tortured by the SS: enemy or victim.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, Kafka remembers the anti-Semitic remarks another patient made at the dining table, and writes a letter sharpened by insomnia and fever:”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“In the room of a hotel in Port-Bou, Walter Benjamin took his own life because there was no road left to take as he fled from the Germans.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“In a letter to Milena, Kafka forgets for a moment whom he’s addressing and writes to himself: You are, after all, completely Jewish, and you know what fear is.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Being alone in a room is perhaps a necessary condition of life,” Franz Kafka wrote Milena.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“You are every one of the different people you have been, the ones you imagined you would be, the ones you never were, and the ones you hoped to become and now are thankful you didn’t.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“The healthy flee from the ill, Franz Kafka once wrote Milena Jesenska, but the ill also flee from the healthy.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Sepharad was the name of our true homeland, although we’d been expelled from it more than four centuries ago.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad: A Novel

“por la que entra una luz clara y gris como la de los cuadros de Vermeer, en los que siempre hay habitaciones que protegen cálidamente de la intemperie a sus ensimismados habitantes y en las que algo les recuerda la amplitud”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sefarad (Biblioteca Breve)