All Quotes

"Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world."

"Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro."

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola."

"My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges."

"Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different."

"The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well."

"We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. [...] I presume that in the heaven of the Blessèd there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves."

"When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it."

"Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time."

"El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi primer propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón."

"I do believe that my country is now joyfully emerging from the swamp. I believe that we deserve to leave the swamp we have been in. And we are leaving it thanks to the work of the Sword. Here, you have already emerged from the swamp. And so Chile, this region, this country, is both a long country and an honorable Sword."

"Ser conservador es una forma de ser escéptico."

"Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song."

"Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown."

"The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book."

"The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?"

"There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it."

"La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia."

"As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves — and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity — are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans."

"No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados..."

"He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz."

"The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things."

"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"Life itself is a quotation."

"¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad."

"Time carries him as the river carries A leaf in the downstream water. No matter. The enchanted one insists And shapes God with delicate geometry. Since his illness, since his birth, He goes on constructing God with the word. The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved."

"Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it."

"En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí."

"I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive."

"I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto."

"Censorship is the mother of metaphor."

"Life and death have been lacking in my life."

"Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life."

"That he was shot after capture demonstrates the fear that the Bolivian authorities felt even of an imprisoned Che. They were afraid to bring to him to trial: afraid of the echoes his voice would have aroused from the courtroom: afraid to prove that the man they hated was loved by the world outside. This fear will help to perpetuate his legend, and a legend is impervious to bullets.""

"Che was not an insane fanatic, and he did not have a pathological love of bloodshed and human cruelty. However, he was not a normal and contented man. If he had been, he would never have become a revolutionary. He was a dreamer, an adventurer, and a rebel against the established order of things. He was a man deeply incensed by the social injustices which he saw all around him, and motivated by a sincere desire to rectify them. He was the perfect revolutionary—the super idealist who insists on bringing haven immediately to earth. Moreover, his willingness to die for his ideals indicates that he possessed far more courage and conviction than the ordinary man."

"He belongs more to the romantic tradition than the revolutionary one. To endure as a romantic icon, one must not just die young, but die hopelessly. Che fulfils both criteria. When one thinks of Che as a hero, it is more in terms of Byron than Marx."

"We predict that Guevara will be eulogized as the model revolutionary who met a heroic death."

"Long Live Che Guevara!"

"As a supporter of the ideals for which Che Guevara died, I am not averse to its reproduction by those who wish to propagate his memory and the cause of social justice throughout the world, but I am categorically against the exploitation of Che's image for the promotion of products such as alcohol, or for any purpose that denigrates the reputation of Che."

"Debray wrote of tossing out the old Marxist-Leninist theories about slowly fomenting revolution. Instead, according to Debray, revolutions began by taking the initiative with an army raised from rural people. That was Castro’s strategy in the mountains of his native Oriente province. And it was what Che was doing in Bolivia. Only in Che’s case, it had not worked out well, and in November a photograph circulated of a Bolivian air force colonel displaying Che’s half-naked corpse. Debray, too, had been caught by the Bolivian army, but rather than killing him, the Bolivians kept him in a prison in a small town called Camiri. In the beginning of 1968 Debray was still there, though the Bolivians allowed his Venezuelan lover, Elizabeth Burgos, to come to the prison so the couple could be married. So in 1968 Fidel Castro’s close friend and co-revolutionary became a martyr, a canonized saint of the revolution—forever young, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, bearded and bereted, with those smiling eyes, the pure revolutionary in deeds and clothing. At the José Martí International Airport in Havana, a poster of the martyr appeared with the message “Youth will intone the chants of mourning to the chatter of machine guns and cries of war. Until victory, forever.” All over Cuba the phrase was written, “Until Victory, Forever.” Sixty thousand students in gray high school uniforms marched past Castro’s reviewing stand, and as each group passed they declared, loudly and enthusiastically, “Our duty is to build men like Che.” “Como Che”—to be like Che, to have more men like Che, to work like Che—the phrase filled the island. The cult of Che had begun."

"Che never wavered from his firm revolutionary stand, even as other Cuban leaders began to devote most of their attention to the internal problems of the revolution."

"I love to see T-shirts or flags with Che Guevara, Diego [Maradona] and Argentina anywhere in the world. It gives me a beautiful feeling."

"Che was an intolerant and dogmatic fanatic, incapable of respecting dissent and ready to eliminate it by force."

"If the personal is political, so is the political personal. If it is true, as Che Guevara so eloquently said, that a revolutionary commitment to human liberation is fueled by love, then how can we not be heartbroken by oppression?"

"Revolutionaries are not normal people': an understatement in relation to Ernesto Che Guevara. Physician, brilliant intellect, competent soldier, charismatic leader, developed—and eventually creative-Marxist economist, always a man able to capture the spirit of an experience in his own being, Che remains one of the four or five greatest revolutionaries in modern history."

"I think that a political revolution is something that starts within each of us. Yes, I think there will be a revolution. There must be a revolution. I think there must be a revolution in this country. But I think that the revolution of institutions cannot really add a new solution or really take unless it is the revolution that begins with the self based on the internal demands of the people. As Che Guevara said shortly before he died, the great revolutions are those revolutions guided by the basic principles of love. And I am not speaking of wishy-washy flowery love, I'm thinking of what I have been saying to you for the last half hour that requires the nitty gritty alterations of institutions into our dreams."

"To hold life in profound respect and to be ready to take up arms and, if need be, to kill, is contradictory only in the eyes of Christian or pacifist humanism. For revolutionary humanism, for Che, the people's war is the necessary answer, the only possible answer, of the exploited and oppressed to the crimes and the institutionalized violence of the oppressors."