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'London and Paris were to pay a bitter price, one with the bombing blitz and the other with Nazi occupation, for the shortsightedness and political helplessness of their governments, who thought only in the shabby logic of imperialism.' ix

'Mai no hauria pensat que la meva veu pogués anar tan lluny i durar tant.'

'It's very important to realize you're not God, always to be doubtful about what you do, and to feel you haven't spent the years of your life well enough. It's the only way of spending the remaining years better.'

'In other words, for the first time in the history of mankind, those who are being spied upon are helping the spies to make their work easier, and gain satisfaction from being observed as they live, even if at times they are behaving like criminals or idiots.'

'All that's left is the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity'

'And will this child of the future think it normal to live in a world where the prime virtue is being seen, a value more important now than sex or money?'

'Postmodernism signaled the crisis of "grand narratives," each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies.'

'Instead, I start listening. And I learn. I listen closely, the way he did. Go on listening, carefully, respectfully. After a while the earth feels free to speak.'

'Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams.'

'Was it not their task to walk, helping the sun to rise? They fulfilled their obligation, perhaps. Are we fulfilling ours? Are we walking? Are we living?'

'A fora plovia. La pluja queia petita damunt de tots els terrats, damunt de tots els carrers, damunt de tots els jardins, damunt del mar com si no tingués prou aigua, i damunt de les muntanyes, potser.'

'But decolonization entails first knowing how settler colonization came about, given what alternatives, and with what consequences.'

'La volia kafkiana, molt kafkiana, absurda, és clar, amb molts coloms; volia que els coloms ofeguessin la protagonista del començament fins a la fi.'

'A man, more than a woman, tends to abandon himself to bits and pieces of things.'

'When he got to the surface, this endless moment would become a small flower pressed between the pages of his diary...poisonous herb or carnivorous plant, it would be no more than a bit of half-transparent colored paper, and as he sipped his tea in the parlor he would hold it up to the light and take pleasure in telling its story.'

'It would not be strange at all if "The Round-Trip Ticket Blues" were the song of mankind imprisoned.'

'Work seemed something fundamental for man, something which enabled him to endure the aimless flight of time.'

'More than iron doors, more than walls, it is the tiny peephole that really makes the prisoner feel locked in.'

'On that bed—with the other one—they had been a feeling man and woman, a watching man and woman; they had been a man who watched himself experiencing and a woman who watched herself experiencing; they had been a man watchung himself and a man watching a woman watching herself...'

'Country people tended to be self-conscious about expressing their feelings in words. And in this sense they were more honest.'

'Perhaps it would be better to say that, rather than losing their passion, they had frozen it by over-idealizing it.'

'Although he may tell others of his hopes, he doesn't dream of them himself. He thinks of himself as worthless and either falls into masochistic loneliness or, failing that, ultimately becomes suspicious and pious, forever denouncing the eccentricities of others.'

'He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.'

'No matter what they did, he mused, there was no escaping the law of the sand.'

'Suddenly he paused in his tracks. Something had stirred near the roots of a clump of grass. It was a spider. Spiders were of no use to him. He sat down to smoke a cigarette.'

'But to another journalist [Azaña] admitted more accurately, "Sol y sombra! Light and shade! That is Spain."'

'"Café gossip," answered Azaña. "I heard it in the Cortes," returned Fischer. "Ah, that's one big café," replied Azaña'

'Companys and his counsellors left prison to be hailed once again as leaders of their beloved city amid scenes of enthusiasm such as even Barcelona's leafy and flower-laden avenues had never seen.' What does this even mean? What does urban greenery have to do with celebration? Utterly bizarre stylistic choices in this book

I'm completely absorbed, somehow I've read half the book in 24 hours and I had plans for most of that time

'I knew that the best thing would be to wait and to watch and to be patient, to strike when everything was right. However, I was not patient. And I knew that things would never be right.'