José Baroja Quotes

“…over time he would realize that the higher he was, the less danger he was in and the more he controlled the ever-ready mass.”

“It's cold, it's always cold in the sanatorium; which leads me to speculate that, maybe, and just maybe, it's not a simple coincidence.”

“Among those corporeal glances, in the midst of those libidinous flirtations and those wild impulses, there were no doubts or excess verses, not even a bad song…”

“The result does not matter: politicians never lose.”

“When Agatha already felt like she was dying, for a second she thought about turning him into a eunuch for life, in self-defense, she would argue.”

“If this were a story, we could affirm that it was a stereotype of an old lady, within a space that had lost its daily life around the corner.”

“Already in his old age, at seventy-five years old, after being seriously hospitalized for a severe heart attack, Javier Pérez would remember that only once in his entire existence had he believed he understood what life was.”

“Why walk with half measures, animals know much more than people, above all because they feel more freely than most of these and, therefore, as Kafka says, they are possessors of all the knowledge about this life. They are just too humble to show it off.”

“For a writer, life must be the focus that death illuminates daily.”

“His life had been a sum of half-hearted decisions.”

“…sometimes I feel like I betray the writer when I try to teach literature.”

“We cannot be naive: the literature book will not solve poverty by itself”

“While it's true that, recently, Ramiro Gutiérrez had shown a tendency toward tearful and painful literature, he had never felt the same way, for example, as the pathetic Werther or the gallant Don Quixote.”

“In a certain way, I think that literature is capable of effectively uncovering and revealing many more “layers” of the framework that composes and hides our society and ourselves. That is, it is capable of bringing us closer to something that, for lack of a better word, I will call “Truth,” and that applies to Art itself, more than to History, more than to Anthropology, or more than to any other branch of the Social Sciences.”

“Today, going to schools is essential, since, just as doctors have a duty to protect life, writers must spread literature, because literature is in itself, along with art in general, the greatest form of freedom we still have.”

“The city becomes an ideal metaphor for how I perceive human beings.”

“Literature must avoid propaganda or moralism if it truly wants to be critical and open.”

“It is often said that children do not read. Well, I'd say that if adults don't start reading, it's not fair to accuse little ones of not reading. They must see us with a book in our hands.”

“In the end, the two failed Chilean constituent processes were a marketing exercise to legitimize the constitution of the Dictatorship.”

“God? Christ. The Virgin. This Guadalajara is so rich in cathedrals, so rich in appearances, that I am sure that these are the true foundations of the city and its misfortune: the rain washes away the sin of this world…”

“If there is such a thing as the eternal return that Nietzsche proposed, I hope to do what is necessary to make it worth repeating every day to infinity.”

“That's the writer's game: everything is about us.”

“…the walls of his house were full of images of a happy past, which in his mind seemed like a constant outside of time.”

“Surrendering to state or private financing is bullshit.”

“I think that a literary work should not be a piece of spit thrown onto the road.”

“She kept saying “I love you,” every time they finished, every time he lost himself inside her, every time they reached that amazing ecstasy of two bodies that already know each other; But, deep down, she, little by little, had begun to doubt that “eternal love,” that verb so easy to conjugate.”

“Surrendering to state or private financing is bullshit.”

“…Who better than a Latin American to write about dirty tricks and other stories.”

“Conditioned like sheep in a flock, they have only managed to say “beee”, which translated into martial language would be “Yes, sir.””

“That work pride, that ridiculous work pride has put an end to his illusions, with those few illusions that he still had since at school they promised him a magnificent future just for entering university.”

“Soon the crashes, the blackouts, the hypothermias, the demands for public lighting and a lot of misdeeds will hide the disappearances, the plots, the deaths, the domestic violence, the corruptions and a long etcetera…”

“No, they never expected or sensed the wishes of that omniscient narrator who, at times, wondered, accompanied by a glass of cabernet, about how his story should be constructed, how this story should develop.”

“Then, Evaristo felt in his hands the exercise of the power that Foucault spoke so much about, and he felt it like someone who discovers fear in his fellow men.”

“Waking up, at forty years old, had become somewhat difficult, not only that morning, but since he was thirty.”

“That apartment was everything those two lovers needed, locked up by their own will in a space and time, paradoxically, of absolute freedom.”

“For the reader, perhaps, this situation will be sadly familiar: witnessing, discovering in these lines, how in a matter of years, what was an eternal oath, had become something so fragile, so disposable, so insignificant.”

“He remained frozen for a few minutes, while urine fell from a limb dwarfed by the fear caused by the sensation of near death.”

“I'll go out on a limb and say that that glow arose from his past.”

“The closest thing to purgatory is a government agency, only the first does not exist and the second is very real.”

“They never noticed the one who, silently, sustained this story, chose the future, set the guidelines for their memories and desires.”

“This is how, without the consent of the two lovers, of its two main characters, of the only ones who were originally worth anything in this short story, the narrator decided to incorporate two more words into the plot: “doubt” and “uncertainty.””

“After that “amen,” Evaristo discovered the faces of approval and fear of his audience, so he knew that he already had them in his hands.”

“In the end, finding the Truth will always be tiring in a world full of appearances.”

“She, perhaps, with a consciousness that many of us in adulthood lack or simply lost, would associate that so much water falling on our fat and heavy heads was due to the crying of some poet who was walking by.”

“How to be sure that nothing will happen, when you don't always need a reason to become one of those cursed and deceptive beings, those entities thrown from the cradle of God.”

“It's been years, months, days, but he still can't get out of his mind those horrible, inhuman images, monstrous creations of subjects who look the same as everyone else; equal to him.”

“Without underestimating the virtues of technical, specialized and necessary education, we cannot accept an education that eliminates the other dimension of human knowledge, that which motivates us to be more cultured, more human, deeper, more emotional.”

“As a poet I am an emotional accident; a lyrical tourist.”

“Suddenly, as the sun rose, the poem flew without an owner, while he faded away like a fiction called a “story.””

“He cannot stop imagining his bloody hands or himself lying mortally at the bottom of that bathtub, which, for now, serves as his refuge, as his escape from the World, from that which is outside, but which, Any day now, I could decide to go in.”

“In my opinion, and beyond the different definitions about this literary genre or the absurd academic discrepancies about its constitution or taxonomy, the story is above all an experiential art.”

“Anita complained pitifully, because just because they don't listen to you because of your “small” voice, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt you.”

““Godín”, is said in Mexico of the office worker from nine to eighteen hours or of any other employee to whom his immediate boss says, during his first day of work and with all the naturalness in the world: “Welcome. From today, your body and soul belong to us.”

“Before becoming godín, Jaime worked for a miserable 79 mexican pesos an hour as a subject professor in one of the many universities in Guadalajara; very little for any future aspirations and very little for any present aspirations.”

“Contrary to what some might believe, writing does not generate enjoyment or pleasure in itself, quite the opposite; And yet, I feel the need to write fiction as if I have a feeling that I will find something in the middle of my narrative journey, no matter how painful it may be.”

““I love you”, “I love you”, “I love you”, they said it for every moment in which they swore eternity and something more, to the point that it was annoying for those of us who were close, because, in reality, who loves each other so much? nowadays.”

“The demons are always around and he knows it.”

“The fear reappears every day, while showering, while watching television, even when just drinking coffee.”

“Promoting reading is a moral responsibility of writers.”

“Unfortunately for him, it is not possible to die twice.”

“Who today asks your poem where the country is going?”

“…this is a story and, therefore, "something must happen", "something" bad, "something" that breaks your safe journey towards the bookstore and, surely, towards "love", because love is the last refuge left in my head or in the depths of any fucking soul.”

“… sin is always far away, whether or not you are a Christian, whether or not you are a "morenista" or a "PRI" or whatever stupidity occurs to you.”

“Today the writer has to be on the ground, because it is on the ground where he is needed most.”

“The person on foot realizes that there is no misery in cities like Madrid or Barcelona, ​​first world cities that, I think, have lost the heart that Latin Americans still have.”

“…we transform the sublime into an onion to remain unread.”