novelists-from-spain

"There is not in the circle of human happiness a cup of honey that has not its drop of gall."

"In our poor human nature, joy and sorrow often manifest themselves by the same symptoms; and a piece of good news will agitate us in the same way as a piece of bad news."

"In his short tales he is most successful when he indulges in the sentimental; he is less attractive when he gives utterance to his pessimistic feeling."

"A Carvalho le molestaba tomar el sol como un lagarto, Pero Teresa demostraba una gran solidaridad con el termostato habitual en todas las mujeres, animales de sangre fría que necesitan el sol y son capaces de someterse a sus rayos con la beatífica expresión del comulgante o incluso con el éxtasis del mistico dispuesto a la entrega divina."

"(Dice el refran) Si quieres un lindo rato, Bebe frio; si una hora, Come en tu casa temprano; Si un buen dia, hazte la barba; Si una semana, vé al baño; Si un buen mes, mata un lechon; Y si quieres un buen año, Cásate con mujer limpia."

"(Que) echar candado â los labios Con nombre de sufrimiento O no es tener sentimiento O es alentar los agravios."

"Con veinte escudos Que harán hablar á los mudos, Me dice el procurador, Que de aquí me sacará."

"Lector, esto libro te ofrezco, sin que me aya mandado Señor alguno que le escriva, ni menos me ayan importunado mis amigos que le estampe, sino solamente por mi gusto, por mi antojo y por mi voluntad."

"Son tantos los ingratos, Que no hubiera calabozos, Si se hubieran de prender, En el mundo para todos."

"Es ya razon de estado y aun forzoso En la buena política y sus leyes, No casar en sus tierras á los reyes."

"(Que) de un reino los cimientos Son la espada y son la pluma."

"(Que) siempre un hombre de bien Fué muy fácil de engañar."

"(Que) sin testigos amor Hace sus tiros mejor."

"Down with the schoolmasters and down with the priests, down with the redeemers and down with sterile icons! Down with the era of messiahs and saviors, of shepherds put at the head of human herds! Down with the icons, the personifications in wood or in flesh of human ignorance and powerlessness; down with the icons which, dead or alive, attempt to assume the role of the directors of our lives, the depositories of eternal verities, the representatives of absolute ideas, the holders of religious or moral power over men."

"One does not see the size of a mountain until one draws away from it. But away in the distance we turn and look and wonder. Have we really come so far? How did we manage to overcome so many serious difficulties in such a cruel and unequal struggle?"

"it must not be forgotten that this is not only a civil war-a social war is also being waged. It is the war of the common people against the rich, against the militarists, against the politicians-all of whom were responsible for the misery and poverty of the proletariat. The political parties were incapable of creating a new moral value in Spain and were unable to oppose the military conspirators. They were mere accomplices of the traitor generals."

"We tried many times before to speed on the social revolution in Spain; attempted to stir up the feelings of the people and to raise the banner of Libertarian Communism. Since the establishment of the Republic we were the only ones who kept the masses alive; the only ones who remained faithful to their revolutionary creed. Without our continued vigilance, Spain to-day would be very different. A timid democracy, a reformist socialism would have held back the masses. Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times."

"The most interesting women in modern European history appear in the ranks of radical political movements. It is difficult to find conservative or traditional counterparts equal to Louise Michel, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg. Even Isadora Duncan, creator of modern dance, flirted with communism. More thoughtful and articulate and certainly as politically active as any of these women is the lesser known Spanish anarchist, Federica Montseny. On asking what attracted these women to radical politics, one discovers in each a commitment to feminism. No person, not even Emma Goldman, explored this necessary relationship between feminist and socialist principles more provocatively than did Federica Montseny."

"After the Russian Revolution a strong movement of the masses developed in Spain, which is the best reply to fascism."

"Without goals to aim for and without any figures on the horizon in whom we can crystallize our life and our need for encouragement and for example, what would our lives be?"

"In Russia, Communist Party administration has succeeded in reconstructing economy-but at the cost of a dictatorship and the submission of a whole people to mere obedience. It is our idea to construct a society directed by the workers' organisations having the complete control of the economic wealth of the land."

"The love of liberty and the sense of human dignity are the basic elements of the Anarchist creed. We need no messiah and no sterile conception of a god menacing us with hell and purgatory. Love, as the basis of life will bind us together. But we must create in each person a sense of responsibility in order that each one of us can have the right to enjoy all his rights. This is an unique movement for us all, because circumstances to-day in Spain have never before existed during any other revolution. Neither the French nor the Russian revolution. To-day, a sense of sacrifice impels us to renounce our aspirations and individual interests for the well-being of all. It is this sense of responsibility which shows us the path of duty and assists us in performing it. In this way, we will avoid the fatal mistake of dictatorship. In Spain, we should have enough intelligence, enough sense of individual and collective responsibility to do for ourselves that which would be imposed upon us by a dictatorship. Very soon we will give to the world the example of a free land, that stood up without arms opposed, as a single man, to fascism, to the mentality of capitalism. It will be an example, worthy of being followed by the rest of the world. We are proud of our responsibility. The greatest joy of our lives is a determination to sacrifice all-to give all-that this dream will be realised-the union of the proletariat to obtain our fundamental aims: BREAD AND FREEDOM FOR ALL!"

"the capitalist class...is not capable of making sacrifices."

"Blessed are those whose souls are transparent, whose lives are honest, and whose hearts are pure; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Blessed are those who believe in human goodness, those who preserve their illusions intact and nourish the hope that for them the doors of life will open. Blessed are those who offer the world their fraternal right hand and friendly visage, those who go with a smile on their lips and cast a light before them. And blessed, too, are those who can love those who can believe, those who can discover within the human wasteland, a tree under which their anxieties concerning their ideal, and their human desires for trust and affection, can take shelter."

"Although It may be our aim, to attempt a total conquest at that time would have meant a broken front, and consequently failure. The fact Is that we were the first to modify our aspirations, the first to understand that the struggle against International fascism was In itself great enough. The struggle is so great that the triumph over fascism alone is worth the sacrifice of our lives. Fascism which desires to become the master of all those who are free in spirit, Everyone-from the most moderate Republican to the most extreme Anarchist-has placed their hope and faith In the struggle which unites them."

"For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me—I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired—it is something essential and structural. It’s like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don’t know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words. But they are two extremely opposite genres; let’s say as essays are to poetry. In particular, within journalism, clearness is a value. The clearer and less misleading a work of journalism is, the better. In a novel, ambiguity is a value. The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don’t know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest."

"I have the feeling . . . no, the conviction, the certainness that reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery."

"what we can control is how we respond to what happens to us, what we do with what happens to us. Even if the range of choice is minimal, there is always a choice...Even in that tiny little range of choice, you can choose. So, from that point of view, destiny is our battlefield. It’s not a tragedy; it is what we do with it."

"You can’t make a living out of fiction writing. You can’t and you shouldn’t. I always tell everyone that is a huge mistake, because I have seen many writers get lost because of that. Novels should be an area of total freedom. It is already difficult to fight against the market pressure, against the pressure from your friends, your family, your editors, against the pressure of your own ambitions. All of that is already a fight. If you also have to earn money to pay for the mortgage, it’s fatal."

"The print journalism I do, reporting, is a literary genre as any other, and it can also be as sublime as any other."

"Kids are the ones who create; I find it really great to have my inner child still alive."

"I will say there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: one of them is American, Ursula K. Le Guin...and the other one is half American, Nabokov, although his Russian ancestry and his Russian works also influence me a lot."

"At any given time, if you live long enough, old age catches you...the only choices we have in life are either the impairment of old age or early death."

"The truth is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways. I am a tremendously existentialist writer; a contemporary novel is a novel that is very much marked by death, but mine is even more than the average one. Then all my books speak in a very obsessive way about death and the passing of time and what the time does to us or undoes to us, because our lives mean us being undone over time."

"The relationship between the human being and the flesh has always been a matter of huge conflict. Since the beginning of time every religion has tried to take control of our selves, usually from a repressive point of view, most often than not inhibiting the body as well. Other times, on the other hand, as in certain eastern liturgies, empowering the body and doing away with the ego. But living inside this body never ceases to be a conflict. We are cultural beings and that clashes with our animal instincts. That’s where the title [La Carne] comes from...In the first place, the flesh is what traps us, because no one has ever chosen his or her body to live in, has he? You are what you are and you didn’t get to choose it. It’s the flesh that traps us in the first place, the flesh that makes us sick, that makes us old and that eventually ends up killing us. But at the same time, it’s that glorious flesh that enables us to scratch heaven through sensuality, through sex, through passion. Paradoxically, the flesh that kills us will also make us feel eternal for a brief moment because that’s what we are in passion, eternal—we abandon ourselves, we merge, we give ourselves to the other, so much that when we are loving passionately, death doesn’t exist."

"The art path leads you to be increasingly free. That’s what you do. Maturity happens because of being increasingly free...to be truly free, you have to break free from internal and external pressures. The things that restrict the freedom of writing are thousands, from the fear of hurting someone to the will of pleasing someone . . . a lot of things. And you actually have to erase the self completely and become a sort of medium, let the story pass through yourself and let the story dance with you."

"Stereotypes stick in the mind like parasites: it's easier to increase a country's GDP per head twelvefold – in the last 40 years Spain's has gone from $2,413 to $29,651 – than to eliminate our neighbours' prejudices about us...It's true that until relatively recently Spain was chauvinistic and backward, yet it's equally true that there have been dramatic changes in the last 40 years...The fact is that Spain is no longer notable for its machismo, when compared with its European neighbours."

"I believe in twinship—in my novels there’s lots of twins—and it’s exactly about that. It’s about all of the possibilities of our own being that we leave behind because one of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us, which also sticks to you and you can’t shake it off, since it was so easy, it’d have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing. So, twins represent the other possible lives you could have led, which you drag behind you some way, in a ghostly way."

"By being completely free, totally erasing the self, you can dance well, you can make love well, and you can write well."

"one of the most widespread mirages is to think we are not going to be like the other old people, we will be different. But, then, age always catches you and you end up being equally shaky, unstable and drooling."

"There are some men who lie even when telling the truth, for they tell it with their lips whilst they lie in their hearts."

"For every judge we sow, we gather six attorneys, two draftsmen, four notaries, five barristers, and five thousand negotiators, and the crop comes every day."

"Since I teach how to kill I may well claim to be called Galen; and if my wounds were to ride on mule back they would pass for bad doctors."

"From the mouth of a stone serpent there gushes a jet of water."

"In dangers, the king who looks on orders with his eyes."

"Happy is he who is born to be a king, if, when he reigns, he shows he deserves to be one."

"The king is a public person, the needs of the realm are his crown. Reigning is not an amusement but a task. A bad king is he who enjoys his State, a good one he who serves it."

"In fact the world is all agreed and calls commodity honour; so that men need only proclaim that they are honourable with- out being so to mock at the world."

"In our days they count a man him who swears rather than him whose beard is grown."

"Women only want a man to grant; for of course they always ask."