Pablo Medina > Quotes

“God likes to be played like a piano.”
― Pablo Medina, The Island Kingdom

“You are prisoners just like me. This whole country has turned into a jail. Don't feel sorry for me, feel sorry for yourselves. At least I have no illusions, I'll die in this rotten place. What will you do?”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“The moral of the story, Felicia said to Antón, was that one learns from everyone, and one should not be afraid of asking questions, even of strangers.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“He is not. There are no accidents in this life. He is teaching himself a lesson.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“All of society was being turned around and there was nothing to be done about it. The life she'd been used to was memory.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Innocence and guilt are masks hidden in the closets of the heart. Sometimes they are interchangeable; more often than not they are identical.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Our country once glowed with life and the heart of its people. Once there was joy in spite of darkness and warmth in spite of fear. What is there now? It used to be that one could grow anything on this soil, it is so fertile, but they are paving it over so that nothing can be planted, so that there is no hope.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“If we had no memory, there would be no history, and without history there would be no guilt or regret. Life would be a series of disconnected situations to be dealt with as one could. We would not know that we had seen better days, and the present would be the exclusive concern of our minds. But we have consciousness and history and regret, and the only way to cope with them is to place one's faith in God, because He is merciful and caring and not a tyrant like Nicolas Campion.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“The world would be a grand place without religion or politics.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Distance, however, leads to temperance and temperance to reason.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Don't tell me about history. I know enough about it to know that it changes people, people don't change it. All this talk about history being like a river is nonsense. History is a storm. You can't change the course of a storm.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“The parents' behavior was inexcusable, granted, but it wasn't necessarily the cause. Other people had suffered similar indignities, if not worse, and, although traumatized, had not become psychotic. On the other hand, there were inmates in the hospital who were hopelessly insane but whose histories exhibited no such parental abuse or neglect. The problem was, he explained, that there was no pattern. Rich, poor, black, white, happy or miserable, madness preys on some but not others. Only two maladies show us, he concluded, that human beings are more equal than not: lunacy and death.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“The soldier, the revolutionary, must blind himself to the intricacies of ideology, that is, he must be impervious to doubt; otherwise, he cannot follow orders and he cannot fight. Then he remembered”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Besides the relatives who had come from all corners of the country, there were a great many friends and acquaintances who had been drawn there not to pay social dues or to impress any of them - the García-Turners were not important or powerful enough in any significant sense. They had come because through the years the family had opened its doors to them, and provided a warmth and understanding they did not experience among their own kind.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“At twenty-one it is easy to be full of cheer”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Little could he understand what the doctor, through thirty years of practice, had come to accept: that experience in the field is worth all the degrees in the world”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Today he is nobody. Tomorrow he will be a different man, and the day after that a different one still, and none of these men will have anything to do with you. We will be dead soon. Nothing will matter after that.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“Good revolutionaries, mused Antonio, pouring himself another whiskey and speaking directly to his grandnephew, must temper their idealism with the instinct for survival. Temerity leads to death and death to the grave. Here then the paradox: The best revolutionary of all is the one who is in it for adventure or for personal gain, like Paco and him.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“A man gets to a point in life when his faculties are no longer what they were. His mind gets brittle, his body sags, he can barely get himself out of bed in the morning. When this happens, there are now two things to do. Either he lets time fatten him into an amorphous shape, without sex, without mind, without spirit...
. . . or he tries to recapture, at least for a moment, the surge of energy he felt as a young man. A man wants to be immortal.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel

“This is the land of waking, Ours was the land of dreaming. Here people matter in relation to their objects; there we mattered in relation to the people who dreamed with us. Our objects died when our dreams did. That is why we need inner light to illuminate our path; here everything is lit, everything is clarified, and morning never ends.”
― Pablo Medina, The Marks of Birth: A Novel