The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Carlos Fuentes

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

life-experience

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

America, Black, Colonies

…my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)

city, dreams, mexico-city, nightmares, urban-hiking

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.

The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.

experiment, language, phenomenon, symbol

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.

empire, language

Normality; show me normality, señor caballero, and I will show you an exception to the abnormal order of the universe; show me a normal event and I shall call it miraculous because it is normal.

chaos, normal, odd, unpredictability

Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.

idealism, introversion, madness, recluse

Writing is a struggle against silence.

writing-process

She begins to feel that the reality show is the university she never attended. Vicarious reality. Emotion without a value-added tax. Movement without danger. Alma finds her reality. She no longer has a reason to put herself at risk and go out into the hostile, degrading world.

emotion, reality-tv, safety

He himself felt defeated because he was fighting against something he did not hate, because he did not understand the fratricidal hatred between the sons of Araby and Israel, and because he loved and knew and appreciated and wanted to save the merits of their cultures, although not the cruelty of their powers; he knew and loved the fountains and the gardens and the patios and high towers of al-Andalus, the nature that has been made more beautiful by man for man’s pleasure, not for his mortification.

hatred, racism, sectarianism, tribalism, war