Source: Keep a Quiet Heart
“The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars.”
Hieres y volverás a herir. Porque hieres y te apartas. No acompañas a la herida.
Voces (1943)
GWU interview (1997)
Context: All the Sixties were complicated, you know. On the one hand it was funny too, you know; on the other hand it was cruel, you know. The communists are so cruel, because they impose one taste on everybody, on everything, and who doesn't comply with their teachings and with their ideology, is very soon labeled pervert, you know, or whatever they want you call it, or counterrevolutionary or whatever. And then the censorship itself, that's not the worst evil. The worst evil is — and that's the product of censorship — is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. I am stopping to being honest, I am becoming hypocrite — and that's what they wanted, they wanted everybody to feel guilty, they were, you know... And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted — steal, you know, lie, whatever. What was important — that they punished if you're innocent, because that puts everybody, you know, puts fear in everybody.
“sorrow… is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”
Source: De Profundis
“Ariane, my sister, wounded by what love,
You died on the shores where you were abandoned.”
Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée,
Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée.
Phèdre, act I, scene III.
Phèdre (1677)
“Thrice venomed is the wound when 'tis Love's hand
Inflicts the blow.”
(3rd August 1822) Sketches from Drawings by Mr. Dagley. Sketch the Second. Love touching the Horns of a Snail, which is shrinking from his hand.
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 88.
“No—foreign swords could never pierce so deeply.
The deadliest wounds are dealt by citizen hands.”
Nulli penitus descendere ferro
contigit; alta sedent civilis volnera dextrae.
Book I, line 31 (tr. Brian Walters).
Pharsalia
Book VII, 7.75-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VII
