The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned on by the Old Testament.
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat
If the Prophet could speak in this new age of modern amenities, I knew he would end such silly tradition.
I had always thought that dying of love was nothing more than poetic license. That afternoon, returning home, again, without the cat and without her, I realized that not only was it possible, but that...
Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had...
You are a donkey. What God gave you in eyes took it to you.
She seemed to him so beautiful, so seductive, so different from common people that he did not understand why no one was as moved as he was by the castanet song of her heels on the cobblestones of the...
Every thing has its own life...the issue is simply awakening their souls.
it is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us.
A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and...
I told them this novel was an American classic, in many ways the quintessential American novel. There were other contenders: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter. Some...
Art is as useful as bread.
It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else's shoes and understand the other's different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere...
Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved...
...I reminded him that the weak cannot enter the kingdom of love, because it is a harsh and strict kingdom, and that women only surrender to determined men, because they give them the reassurance they...
Empathy lies at the heart of , like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because...
There was always someone outside of the chalk circle. Someone who needed money, someone who had a son with whooping cough, or someone who wanted to go off and sleep forever because he could not stand...
It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
I used to tell him: Never steal anything A person needs it to eat
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
It was simply a way of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was more solid than love: a common prick of conscience.
They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.
I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.
The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own...
This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.
The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities,...
The revolution taught me not to be consoled by other people's miseries, not to feel thankful because so many others had suffered more. Pain and loss, like love and joy, are unique and personal; they...
A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates...
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice
If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.
Isabel's private theory of moral proximity, the basis of those obligations that came into existence when we found ourselves close enough to others to be able to witness or feel their needs, or when we...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Inscribed on the back was a line from Virgil in Latin: Audentes fortuna juvat. Fortune favors the...
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...
The rain was pattering hypnotically on the plane's exterior.