novelists-from-uruguay

"For centuries men looked for comfort to their deepest anguish, but all answers seemed small before death. Until someone, it’s unknown who, discovered the truth. And since they saw it served all as an answer to the fears of the first man, they defended it with their blood and with the blood of others, first and then with the lie."

"Don’t think we’re indifferent. What happens is that normally we’re busy with something that is not the others."

"We call reality to madness that remains and madness to reality that vanishes"

"Los hombres y las mujeres (sobre todo los hombres) han escrito las leyes y las constituciones. Los hombres y las mujeres (sobre todo las mujeres) pueden y deben volver a escribirlos según las necesidades de los vivos, no de los muertos"

"It wasn’t businessmen who developed new technology and science but amateur inventors or salaried professors instead; from the foundation of this country to the invention of the Internet, continuing with Einstein and finally, the arrival of the first man on the moon. Not to mention, the basis of the sciences—which were shaped by those horrible and uncivilized Arabs centuries before—from the numbers that we use to Algebra to algorithms and many other sciences and philosophies that are part of Western civilization today, continuing with the Europeans in the 17th century. None of these men were businessmen, of course."

"Terrorism is not justified with anything, but it’s explained with everything."

"Hypocrisy is a luxury of the powerful."

"The worst thing that can happen to a democracy is that its citizens leave the politics in the hands of politicians."

"Probably a form of radical democracy will be the next step humanity is ready to take. How will we know when this step is being produced? We need signs. One strong sign will be when the administration of meaning ceases to lie in the hands of elites, especially of political elites. Representative democracy represents what is reactionary about our times. But direct democracy will not come about through any brusque revolution, led by individuals, since it is, by definition, a cultural process where the majority begins to claim and share social power. When this occurs, the parliaments of the world will be what the royals of England are today: an onerous adornment from the past, an illusion of continuity."

"While universities make robots that look more like human beings every time, not only because of their proven intelligence but now also because of their abilities to express and receive emotions, the consumerist habits are making us every time more similar to robots."

"The fear of the other makes us resemble the other who fears us."

"When we talk about drugs, we blame the producers, not the consumers. But when we talk about weapons, we blame the consumers, no the producers. The reason consists, as I understand, in the place of power. In the case of drugs, the products are the others, not us; in the case of weapons, the consumers are the others; we limit ourselves to their production."

"A society is not defined as developed by the wealth it has but by the poverty it doesn’t have."

"That blind attitude of the Society of Knowledge is similar in all to the proud consideration that "our language is better because it’s understood." Just that with a completely tragic intensity, that could be translated like this: "our dead are true because they hurt.""

"We inhabit the cities of the dead and their ideas inhabit us every day."

"There’s no better strategy against a true rumor than inventing another fake one that claims to confirm it."

"It’s not by chance that most of the basketball players are tall men, nor that most of the transvestite are homosexuals. It’s also not a coincidence that most of those who hold the power are ambitious people. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that the world is ruled by people who shouldn’t rule."

"Somebody told me once that I couldn’t talk about religion because I wasn’t a religious man. I kept thinking for a moment because he was right about something: I am a religious spirit, but not a religious man because my mind doesn’t know about safety. Obviously, he was wrong about the rest. “Sir – I wanted to answer, not without shyness –, if Catholic priests have given marital advice since always and now they even give a sexual conduct class, why can’t an atheist teach theology?""

"In our Post era, a new phenomenon has emerged expressing this new associative will of the species: I mean the super-networks of communication [Internet]. On this I conceive two images, one enthusiast and another disappointed: I see Gea as a body (the Biosphere) and as a mind or spirit (the Exosphere); the human creatures would be the neurons and the electronic networks the dendrites. Okay, an autistic geopsychology, full of traumas, and other psych pathologies. But let's not say that we already lack the means to understand each other."

"The relationship that in our time unites us with Money is completely abstract. That’s where our society resembles to the one in the Middle Ages: we fear a symbolic and invisible entity, like men feared God thousands of years ago. The stock exchange changes without our participation. Between the stock and us there’s a theology of money called “economy” that, in general, is in charge of rationally explaining something that doesn’t have more reason than it’s symbolic power."

"What is at stake today is not only protecting the West against the terrorists, home-grown and foreign, but — perhaps above all — protecting the West from itself. The reproduction of any one of its most monstrous events would be enough to lose everything that has been attained to date with respect to Human Rights. Beginning with respect for diversity. And it is highly probable that such a thing could occur in the next ten years, if we do not react in time."

"Before the great civil revolution there will be a deepening of the crisis of this obsolete order. This crisis will happen in almost all areas, from the political order to the economic, passing through the military. The Superpower is nowadays very fragile due to its military resources, with which it has mined the most strategic weapon of ancient diplomacy […] it won’t be able to resist an increasingly hostile context because its economy, base of its military power, will weaken in inverse proportion. Today it’s able to win any war, with or without allies, but the successive triumphs won’t be able to save it from a progressive erosion. The immediate result will be great global insecurity, although it will be overcome with the civil revolution. In this moment breaking point, the West will debate between greater military control or civil disobedience, which will be silent and anonymous, without leaders or warlords."

"In his Book of Embraces, Eduardo has a story that I love. To me it is a splendid metaphor of writing in general and his writing in particular. "There was an old and solitary man who spent most of his time in bed. There were rumors that he had a treasure hidden in his house. One day some thieves broke in, they searched everywhere and found a chest in the cellar. They went off with it and when they opened it they found that it was filled with letters. They were the love letters the old man had received all over the course of his long life. The thieves were going to burn the letters, but they talked it over and finally decided to return them. One by one. One a week. Since then, every Monday at noon, the old man would be waiting for the postman to appear. As soon as he saw him, the old man would start running and the postman, who knew all about it, held the letter in his hand. And even St. Peter could hear the beating of that heart, crazed with joy at receiving a message from a woman.""

"Caroline S. Conzelman, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said her first thought was that she wouldn’t change how she used the book, “because it still captures the essence of the emotional memory of being colonized.” But now, she said: “I will have them read what he says about it. It’s good for students to see that writers can think critically about their own work and go back and revise what they meant.”"

"Eduardo Galeano's Genesis, he recounts a series of anecdotes which are really the roots of the Spanish American experience. It is a very poetic work because he has gathered the most moving moments of the chronicles. It is only now that we are beginning to understand many things about the conquest of America, and this book is a part of that process of reevaluation."

"I love Galeano’s books. I mean, his book Open Veins of Latin America was an absolute eye-opener for many people, and Days and Nights of Love and War."

"In his 1976 essay "Defensa de la palabra" Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote, "What process of change can move a people that does not know who it is, nor where it came from? If it doesn't know who it is, how can it know what it deserves to be?" The role of a socially committed historian is to use history, not so much to document the past as to restore to the dehistoricized a sense of identity and possibility. Such "medicinal" histories seek to reestablish the connections between people and their histories, to reveal the mechanisms of power, the steps by which their current condition of oppression was achieved, through a series of decisions made by real people to dispossess them, but also to reveal the multiplicity, creativity, and persistence of their own resistance."

"I've gone back many times to Eduardo Galeano's essay Defense of the Word,"...Galeano's "defense" was written after his magazine, Crisis, was closed down by the Argentine government. As a writer in exile, he has continued to interrogate the place of the written word, of literature, in a political order that forbids literacy and creative expression to so many; that denies the value of literature as a vehicle for social change even as it fears its power. Like Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, he knows that censorship can assume many faces, from the shutting down of magazines and the banning of books by some writers, to the imprisonment and torture of others, to the structural censorship produced by utterly unequal educational opportunities and by restricted access to the means of distribution-both features of North American society that have become more and more pronounced over the past two decades."

"Galeano's vision is unswerving, surgical and yet immensely generous and humane.... Eduardo Galeano ought to be a household name....""

"Many years ago, when I was young and still believed that the world could be shaped according to our best intentions and hopes, someone gave me a book with a yellow cover that I devoured in two days with such emotion that I had to read it again a couple more times to absorb all its meaning: Open Veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano…There is one other aspect of Eduardo Galeano that fascinates me. This man who has so much knowledge and who has-by studying the clues and the signs-developed a sense of foretelling, is an optimist. At the end of Century of the Wind, the third volume of Memory of Fire, after 600 pages proving the genocide, the cruelty, the abuse, and exploitation exerted upon the people of Latin America, after a patient recount of everything that has been stolen and continues to be stolen from the continent, he writes: “The tree of life knows that, whatever happens, the warm music spinning around it will never stop. However much death may come, however much blood may flow, the music will dance men and women as long as the air breaths them and the land plows and loves them." This breath of hope is what moves me the most in Galeano's work."

"Like thousands of refugees all over the continent, I also had to leave my after the military coup of 1973. I could not take much with me: some clothes, family pictures, a small bag with dirt from my garden, and two books: an old edition of the Odes by Pablo Neruda, and the book with the yellow cover, Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina. More than twenty years later I still have that same book with me. That is why I could not miss the opportunity to write this introduction and thank Eduardo Galeano publicly for his stupendous love for freedom, and for his contribution to my awareness as a writer and as a citizen of Latin America. As he said once: "it's worthwhile to die for things without which it's not worthwhile to live.""

"As the owners of heaven forbade chocolate to mortals, so the owners of earth forbade it to commoners."

"This book is a monument in our Latin American history."

"somos todos mortales hasta el primer beso y el segundo vaso"

"Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way."

"Open Veins’ tried to be a book of political economy, but I didn’t yet have the necessary training or preparation"

"The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield."

"I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people."

"The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show. Their officials, international technocrats, rule our countries: they are neither presidents nor ministers, they have not been elected, but they decide the level of salaries and public expenditure, investments and divestments, prices, taxes, interest rates, subsidies, when the sun rises and how frequently it rains. However, they don't concern themselves with the prisons or torture chambers or concentration camps or extermination centers, although these house the inevitable consequences of their acts. The technocrats claim the privilege of irresponsibility: 'We're neutral' they say."

"The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing."

"The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day"

"Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories."

"We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content."

"“He discovered or described hundreds of afflictions and cures, and by testing remedies he concluded “Laughter is the best medicine””"

"The results of civilization were surprising: our lives became more secure but less free, and we worked a lot harder.”."