Quotes About Struggle

One of the inconveniences of stealing books—especially for a novice like myself—is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.

En aquel tiempo yo tenía veinte años y estaba loco. Había perdido un país pero había ganado un sueño. Y si tenía ese sueño lo demás no importaba.

I possessed only a book, which I carried in my small backpack. Suddenly, while I was walking, the book began to burn. Dawn was breaking and almost no cars passed. While throwing the charred backpack in an irrigation ditch I felt my back sting as though I had wings.

Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us.

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.

There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night.

I am being followed, I realized, with a blend of certitude and astonishment, like a soldier discovering that gangrene has taken hold of his leg.

This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

One day I'll die of cancer.

Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured.

The Lord's Prayer? asked the inspector. No, oh no, my mind went blank, said the Pápago, I prayed for my soul, I prayed to the Holy Mother, I begged the Holy Mother not to abandon me.

Nothing very expensive, as you can see, though when you're poor anything that isn't free is expensive.

Artaud decía que escribir era una marranada, que todos los escritores eran unos cerdos, sobre todo los de ahora. Lo suscribo. Sin embargo, pese a todo, continúo admirando a los jóvenes escritores. De la misma forma que admiro a los jóvenes boxeadores

Pronto comprendió que sólo existían dos maneras de acceder a él: mediante la violencia abierta, que no venía al caso pues era un hombre apacible y nervioso al que repugnaba hasta la vista de la sangre, o mediante la literatura, que es una forma de violencia soterrada y que concede respetabilidad y en ciertos países jóvenes y sensibles es uno de los disfraces de la escala social.

sandanista or somocista the police is always the police

The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.

La literatura es una máquina acorazada. No se preocupa de los escritores. A veces ni siquiera se da cuenta de que éstos están vivos. Su enemigo es otro, mucho más grande, mucho más poderoso, y que a la postre la terminará venciendo, pero ésa es otra historia.

In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; it's anaemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle.

We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep.

Un poeta lo puede soportar todo. Lo que equivale a decir que un hombre lo puede soportar todo. Pero no es verdad: son pocas cosas las que un hombre puede soportar. Soportar de verdad. Un poeta, en cambio, lo puede soportar todo. Con esta convicción crecimos. El primer enunciado es cierto, pero conduce a la ruina, a la locura, a la muerte.

So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet's Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?)