Brian Iniguez

“My dear Brás Cubas, don’t let yourself be overcome by these vapors. The deuce! You must be a man! Be strong! Fight! Win! Shine! Influence! Dominate! Fifty is the age for wisdom and government. Take heart, Brás Cubas; don’t go soft. What have you to do with the passage from ruin to ruin, flower to flower? You must try to savor life; and know that the worst philosophy is that of the sniveler who lies on the riverbank to bemoan the never-ending flow of the waters. It is their business to never come to rest; come to terms with that law, and try to make the most of it.”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations