Sandra Barron > Sandra's Quotes

“La sopa de tortilla, aromatizada con yerbas frescas de la huerta, el frito de plátanos, carne desmenuzada y roscas de harina de maiz, el excelente chocolate de la tierra, el queso de piedra, el pan de leche, y el agua servida en antiguos y grandes jarros de plata, no dejaron que desear.”
― Jorge Isaacs, María

“You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.”
― Roman Payne

“I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what’s on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.”
― Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon

“People are going to die," he said flatly. "It's statistics." Then he got up and left the room.”
― Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

“This was exactly why they'd failed: never being satisfied with what a person had to give, always expecting so much sacrifice that you had to hate yourself for anything less.”
― Sonya Huber, Opa Nobody

“There must be a government, said the first blind man I'm not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.”
― José Saramago

“There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”
― John Updike, Couples

“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”
― John Updike, Couples

“No act is so private it does not seek applause.”
― John Updike, Couples

“Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darkness had been boiled down to their ultimate density.”
― Haruki Murakami

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“One should . . . be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“It's just a game,” she says. Make no mistake: people who say it's just a game are out for blood.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Bridge Ladies

“I read once that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog," Mark said. "You find out how it works, but the frog dies in the process.”
― Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight

“Be careful. Please. The border…The fucking border.” I feel a wildness spreading through me. “It’s nothing but a giant wound, a big gash between the two countries. Why does it have to be like that? I don’t understand. It’s just some random, stupid line. How can anyone tell people where they can and can’t go?”
― Erika L. Sánchez, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

“The seamen rarely depicted themselves or their companions as agents of an imperial system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles, ambitions, and ultimately with their own survival. It was precisely such unthinkable complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system so many of them rarely question.”
― David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder