Paz > Paz's Quotes

“Seen nothing? Idiot! We have all the work and all the worry: children to feed, wounds to tend. Once the war is over, you men are all heroes. The dead: heroes. The survivors: heroes. The maimed: heroes. That’s why you invented war. It’s your war. You wanted it, so get on with it – heroes, my ass!”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“Сегодня, когда методы, аргументы, приёмы "старинного спора" о цивилизационных путях и выборах России обнажаются до полного неприличия, я с неменьшей "обнажённостью" понимаю, что единственно адекватной позицией думающего российского человека является позиция "немножко иностранца". Это, я уверен, правильная позиция. Точная. Спасительная.

В этом смысле, кстати, ставший вдруг политически уязвимым термин "иностранный агент" не такой уж и бессмысленный. Ну, в общем-то, да, агент. Агент мировой цивилизации, агент международного права, агент интернационального культурного контекста. Готов подписаться под протоколом. Давай, гражданин начальник, бумагу, ручку и чернильницу — всё подпишу. Агент и есть. Запиши явку с повинной.”
― Лев Рубинштейн, Причинное время

“Мы знали, что есть какой-то Запад, что оттуда до нас доходят книжки, пластинки и пачки «Мальборо». Но его как бы и не было. Он был отчасти выдумкой, утопией. Если мы ощущали себя в колючих железных скобках, то Запад был в кавычках.”
― Лев Рубинштейн, Погоня за шляпой и другие тексты

“In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.”
― Quentin Crisp

“I think I can say that effeminate homosexuals are among those who indulge least in sex acts with other boys at school. They seem to realize that these jolly get-togethers are really only a pooling of the carnal feelings of two people who deep down are interested in their dreams of girls. Otherwise they tend to be self-congratulatory pyrotechnical displays of potency.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“Every opportunity for pleasure that was offered to me automatically carried with it an almost equally strong desire to do without it. I might give way to either impulse, but the presence of the two contrary wishes was what gave zest to both.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that has this liberating effect. Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment, but of boredom.”
― Quentin Crisp

“If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.”
― Quentin Crisp

“It was not so much that I longed for death as that I didn't long for life.”
― Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

“I could not help remembering that I myself had uttered to a journalist in 1967, during the dawn of tropicalismo, a sentence that Tom Zé would soon use in a song resonant with the movement: "I am Bahian and I am a foreigner." In fact, we had understood that in order to do what we believed necessary, we had to rid ourselves of Brazil as we knew it. We had to destroy the Brazil of the nationalists, we had to go deeper and pulverize the image of Brazil as being exclusively identified with Rio.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“In fact what estranged me most from rock, and from that entire impulse toward Americanization, was that it reached me without carrying any trace of rebellion.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“It should be against the law to mock someone who tries his luck in a foreign language.”
― Chico Buarque, Budapeste

“We are inclined to find the Scottish r's somewhat inadequate, while we admire the refined British who pronounce the intervocalic or nearly aspirated final r's so dryly—as opposed to the coarser Americans who relish chewing on long, cavernous, supersalivated r's, whatever the letter's position in the word.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“My idle dreams of leaving behind what I was already doing professionally in order to study, to direct films, or to write receded with the shock of prison and exile. I simply lacked the strength even to adumbrate an act of will. The bell that had rung as I was falling asleep that morning the police had come to take me away had so deeply left its mark that I was still trembling at the sound of the doorbell in Chelsea. So it was impossible for me to dare do anything I might wish. And insofar as there was growing receptivity to what I did among my fellow professionals in London, a simple instinct for survival bound me to the activity in which I was already installed. I would stay home listening to Gil play, at times playing myself, watching television, reading, and above all conversing with people who came by. I was always chatty, but my happiness did not last even until my head hit the pillow. There was always something to feel ashamed of. And I didn't know how to get out of this.”
― Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil

“I strove to speak such fastidious Hungarian that perhaps for this very reason it sometimes rang false. Perhaps a word here or there, pronounced with excessive zeal, stood out like a glass eye that was more realistic than the good eye.”
― Chico Buarque, Budapeste

“For an immigrant, an accent may be a form of vengeance, a way of insulting the language that constrains him. In the language he does not esteem, he will mumble only the words necessary to his work and daily life, always the same words, not one more. And even these he shall forget at the end of his life, to return to the vocabulary of childhood. Just as the names of those around us are forgotten when the memory begins to lose water, as a swimming pool slowly drains away, as yesterday is forgotten while our deepest memories remain. But for one who had adopted a foreign tongue as if hand-picking his own mother, for one who had sought out and loved every last one of its words, the persistence of an accent was an unfair punishment.”
― Chico Buarque, Budapeste

“Love, while a fine thing, might be little more than an accident. It was what came next that mattered.”
― Cat Sebastian, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb