“My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's. ” 

“You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.” 

“There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed.” 

“His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference.” 

“She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.” 

“She did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously.” 

“Land is something one should never sell. It is the only thing left when all else is gone.” 

“There is room in the human heart for all the divinities.” 

“Before you conquer the mountain, you must learn to overcome your fear.” 

“​Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.” 

“How many times have I told you not to believe everything you hear? Seek truth for yourself.” 

“It’s easy to judge others when we are not going through the same thing.” 

“Remember that all the others are more afraid than you” 

“Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.” 

“I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.” 

“They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another. ” 

“She intended to swallow the world and he lived crushed by reality.” 

“If nothing hurts, that means I woke up dead,” 

“I felt an unrelenting restlessness. It was the first time I had ever experienced jealousy, and that emotion clung to my skin day and night like a dark stain, a contamination I could not shed; it became so unbearable that when finally I rid myself of it, I was freed forever of the desire to possess another person or the temptation ever to belong to anyone.” 

“I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.” 

“He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. ” 

“After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.” 

“You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.” 

“She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh” 

“His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream...an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered...” 

“I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.” 

“I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community and also, why not? this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration.” 

“It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie.” 

“I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.” 

“But I don't want more things than I need, either.” 

“I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful-- for the simple reason that I wanted to be. And then never gave the matter a second thought. -Eva Luna” 

“The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.” 

“Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of unknown things. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality” 

“write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.” 

“Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. ” 

“We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.” 

“Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard” 

“My father says that fear is good; it's the body's alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can't be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.” 

“A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.” 

“I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.” 

“Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.” 

“What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?” 

“Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.” 

“that in itself age doesn’t make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.” 

“Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....” 

“I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.” 

“This is the kind of detail that is forbidden in literature; in a book, no one would dare combine a full moon with Frank Sinatra. The problem with fiction is that it must seem credible, while reality seldom is.” 

“He had a principle: if you lend money and never see the person again, that's money well spent.” 

“I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.” 

“She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people's pets.”