Life's Beauty

But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.

You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.

You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish.

“Nevertheless life and death are mysterious states, and we know little of the resources of either.”

I forget all my life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness.

(…) her liveliness and her warmth would convince you that it is possible for a woman to be a student without being a pedant - without in fact ceasing to be a woman. You would find that the past is interesting to her because the present is so intensely real; that she handles knowledge purely as the instrument of feeling, and loves it only because by it feeling is deepened, widened and refined.

(…) la guerra no la deciden las espadas y las lanzas, es decir, el coraje y la pericia del individuo, sino el tronar de los cañones y la pólvora, una artillería que, en el estruendo de las matanzas que provoca, ha volatizado aquellos códigos de honor individual y las proezas de los héroes que forjaron las siluetas míticas de un Amadís de Gaula, de un Tirante el Blanco y de un Tristán de Leonís.

(…) para que no peligrase la nave del juicio entre los vientos de las aclamaciones.

In a system in which cheating is the norm, following the rules amounts to a handicap.

No hay un solo libro que sea ajeno al sesgo político. La opinión de que el arte nada tiene que ver con la política, ni debe tener que ver con ella, es en sí misma una actitud política.

Y si cabe extraer una lección, es que el ansia de poder es una circunstancia histórica combatible, no una fuerza natural ni una esencia humana que justifique grandes teorías sobre combates de imperios incesantes y necesarios.

Si algo significa la libertad, es el derecho a decirle a la gente lo que no quiere oír.

Orwell advertía que el totalitarismo no solo inhibe la expresión de ciertos pensamientos, sino que «dicta lo que debemos pensar, crea una ideología para nosotros, trata de gobernar nuestra vida emocional al tiempo que establece un código de conducta».

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

The sun burned everyday. It burned Time. The world rushed in a circle and turned on its axis and time was busy burning the years and the people anyway, without any help from him. So if he burned things with the firemen and the sun burned Time, that meant that everything burned!

He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank, the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

Above all, the modern drama, operating through the double channel of dramatist and interpreter, affecting as it does both mind and heart, is the strongest force in developing social discontent, swelling the powerful tide of unrest that sweeps onward and over the dam of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition.