The collection / 28 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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02Undated

Cristo quería a los justos, habitaba las buenas conciencias, pertenecía a los hombres de bien, a la gente decente, a las buenas reputaciones. ¡Que cargara el diablo con los humildes, con los pecadores, con los abandonados, con los rebeldes, con los miserables, con los que quedaban al margen del orden aceptado!

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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03Undated

I dalje verujem da Sunce izlazi svakoga dana i da svako novo Sunce najavljuje novi dan;dan koji je juče bio budućnost. I dalje verujem da će današnji dan, u trenutku zatvaranja jedne stranice vremena, obećati sutra – ranije nepredvidivo, kasnije neponovljivo

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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04Undated

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It's one of the oldest urges in mankind. It's a way of stalling death.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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05Undated

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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06Undated

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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07Undated

Power does not alter a man's character. It merely reveals it.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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08Undated

all that was left to me was certain images and all of them spoke to me of the collapse of a cruel world and the slow construction in its stead of another world, equally cruel.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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09Undated

Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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10Undated

Nor is the limitation of what is sayable a limit to the doable: this last is the possibility of literature.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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11Undated

The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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12Undated

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

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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13Undated

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.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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14Undated

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

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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15Undated

I discovered very quickly that criticism is a form of optimism, and that when you are silent about the shortcomings of your society, you're very pessimistic about that society. And it's only when you speak truthfully about it that you show your faith in that society.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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16Undated

Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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17Undated

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.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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18Undated

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.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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19Undated

Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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20Undated

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.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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21Undated

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.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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22Undated

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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23Undated

Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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24Undated

…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.)

Carlos Fuentes / quote

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