Arturo Perez Reverte Quotes

I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things.

Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.

Everyone gets the devil he deserves.

The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.

There had been three priests, proponents of so-called liberation theology. They had opposed the reactionary tide from Rome. And in all three cases the IEA had done the dirty work for Iwaszkiewicz and his Congregation. Corona, Ortega, and Souza were prominent progressive priests working in marginal dioceses, poor districts of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. They believed in saving man here on earth, not waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven.

[L]ife is like an expensive restaurant where, sooner or later, someone always hands you the bill, which is not to say that you should deny the joy and pleasure afforded by the dishes already eaten.

But one never knows how the dice will fall, and they are always cast before anyone even notices.

And which devil do you prefer? Dante's?"
"No. Much too terrifying. Too medieval for my taste."
"Mephistopheles?"
"Not him, either. He's too pleased with himself. Too much a trickster, like a crooked lawyer ... Anyway, I never trust people who smile a lot."
"What about the one in The Karamazovs?"
"Petty. A civil servant with dirty nails. I suppose the devil I prefer is Milton's fallen angel.

Whenever I got any money, I invested it in books. When my savings dwindled, I got rid of everything else - pictures, furniture, china. I think you understand what it is to be a passionate collector of books ...

Fucking incredible! Four miles in five minutes, with a slight maneuver to avoid an oil barge anchored halfway in. And when the HJ peeled away and abandoned the pursuit and the helicopter began to fall back and gain altitude, Teresa stood up in the middle of the speedboat and, still illuminated by the spotlight, lifted a triumphant single finger. Adiós Cabróooon.

She loves you, loathes you, treats you well, then ill. Like a leech or a surgeon's knife, she's double-edged: sometimes she'll cure, but sometimes she will kill.

Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it's for life.

Later, with time, I learned that although all men are capable of good and evil, the worst among them are those who, when they commit evil, do so by shielding themselves in the authority of others, in their subordination, or in the excuse of following orders. And even worse are those who believe they are justified by their God.

Always that damned discipline that you wear like chain mail ... You would have got on well with Bernard de Clairvaux and his gang of Knights Templar. If you'd been captured by Saladin, I'm sure you'd rather have had your throat cut than renounce your faith. But not from devotion, from pride.

As for myself, I would just say that, because of what I am, I can at least look myself in the face when I stand before the mirror each morning to shave. And that, madam, is more than many men I know can do.

An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius

Despite my youth I already suspected that it did no harm to keep my ears open. Just the opposite. In life, danger lies not in not knowing, but in revealing that you do: It is always good to have a sense of the music before the dance begins.

Don Jaime relied on this to conserve what he defined as serenity: peace of mind and soul, the only fragment of wisdom to which human imperfection could aspire. His whole life lay before him, smooth, broad, and definitive, as untroubled by uncertainty as a river flowing to the sea.

But he was calm, like a hunter who is sure that he will catch his prey in the end, however confusing the trial.

Who are you?"
"The devil," she said. "The devil in love.

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I'm afraid of wooden horses, cheap gin, and pretty girls. Especially when they give me presents. And when they go by the name of the woman who defeated Sherlock Holmes.

The sea was cruel and selfish as human beings, and in its monstrous simplicity had no notion of complexities like pity, wounding, or remorse ... You could see yourself in it ... while the wind, the light, the swaying, the sound of the water on the hull worked the miracle of distancing, calming you until you didn't hurt anymore, erasing any pity, any wound, and any remorse.

You can get used to anything, especially when you have no option. If you have to pay, you pay; it's just a question of attitude. At a particular moment in your life you adopt a certain position, whether mistaken or not. You decide to be like this or that. You burn your boats, and then all you can do is defend that position, come what may.

You've just mentioned the price that has to be paid ... Pride, freedom ... Knowledge. Whether at the beginning or at the end, you have to pay for everything. Even courage, don't you think? And don't you think a lot of courage is needed to fight God?

The men buckled on their weapons and started outside amid high expectations, taking care not to leave their backs unguarded
just in case
for Jesus may have said something about brothers, but he made no mention of cousins.

What a lousy world, even Lucifer has to resort to the small print.

As far as cheating goes , you have illustrious predecessors . Theseus escaped from the labyrinth thanks to Ariadne's thread , Jason stole the golden fleece with Medea's help .... The Kaurabas used subterfuge to win at dice in the Mahabharata , and the Achaeans checkmated the Trojans by moving a wooden horse . Your conscience is clear .

The miser is counting his gold pieces, unaware of Death, who holds two clear symbols: an hourglass and a pitchfork."
"Why a pitchfork and not a scythe?"
"Because Death reaps but the Devil harvests

The Spaniard will become a worthless slave, devoid of soul, of reason, of virtue; forbidden by his inhuman jailers from ever seeing the light. An unfortunate wretch subjugated by men who are his equals but who, in his stupidity, his laziness, his superstition, he believes to be anointed by some higher power: these gods among men, wearing ermine and purple, black capes and cassocks, who under every sun and at every latitude will always exploit a man's foolishness in order to enslave him, to make him brutish and miserable, to sap his valor and his courage.

Of all the universal lies she accepted unquestioningly, the happy ending was the most absurd. The hero and heroine lived happily ever after, and the ending seemed indisputable, definitive. No questions asked about how long love or happiness lasts in that 'forever' that can be divided into lifetimes, years, months. Even days

However, one certainty floated in the air: that night, at the end of a conversation that should have brought them closer, something had been broken between them, definitively and forever. He did not know what, but there was the unmistakable noise of pieces shattering to the ground about him. The young woman would never forgive him for his cowardice -- or for his resignation.

I imagine he's married. Or was ... He seems damaged in the way that only we women can damage men.

He did not want to think, but it was inevitable that he would.

Never trust a man who reads only one book.

You're forgetting about God.
He doesn't interest me. God tolerates the intolerable, he is irresponsible and inconsistent. He is not a gentleman.

It's usually the father who teaches the child his first moves in the game. And the dream of any son who plays chess is to beat his father. To kill the king. Besides, it soon becomes evident in chess that the father, or the king, is the weakest piece on the board. He's under continual act, in constant need of protection, of such tactics as castling, and he can only move one square at a time. Paradoxically, the king is also indispensable. The king gives the game its name, since the word 'chess' derives from the Persian word shah meaning king, and is pretty much the same in most languages.

The problem with words is that once spoken, they cannot find their way back to the speaker alone.

The pistol is not a weapon, it is an impertinence.

In essence , games are the only universally serious activity . They leave no room for skepticism , wouldn't you agree ? However incredulous or doubting you might be , if you want to play , you have no choice but to follow the rules . Only the person who respects the rules , or at least knows and applies them , can win . Reading a book is the same : you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story .

A reader is the total of all he's read, in addition to all the films and television he's seen.

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing. And when I want to know something, I look it up in books
their memory never fails

But that is the way of life, and that was but one of the first times, among no few to come, that I was taught a useful lesson about how appearances trump truth, and how villains hide their vices behind masks of piety, honour, and decency. And that to denounce evildoers without proof, attack them with weapons, trust blindly in reason or justice, is often the fastest road toward one's own perdition, while the scoundrels who use influence or money as a shield remained untouched.

You can still turn back, he told himself. In that way, none of what happened has ever happened, and none of what will take place will ever take place.

You can make a text mean anything, especially if it's old and full of ambiguities.

A woman is never just a woman dear Max. She is first and foremost the men she once had, those she has, and those she might have. Without them, she remains a mystery... and whoever discovers that information possesses the combination to the safe. The access to her secrets.

Audience turn to archetype packed stories to enjoy, whether consciously or unconsciously, the device of repeated plots with small variations. Dispositio rather than elocution. That's why the serial, even the most trite television serial, can become a cult both for a naïve audience and for a more sophisticated one.

Flowers just keep growing, detached and sure of themselves, she had once said,. We're the fragile ones.

You don't choose your friends, they choose you, and you either reject them or you accept them without reservations.

There are very subtle shades of violence, I can assure you. A civilization that renounces the possibility of resorting to violence in thought or deed destroys itself. It becomes a flock of sheep that will get their throats cut by the first person to come along. The same thing happens to men.

Sometimes," he said at last, as if it were an enormous effort to formulate his thoughts, "I wonder if chess is something man invented or if he merely discovered it. It's as if it were something that has always been there, since the beginning of the universe. Like whole numbers.

We find ourselves in the last of the three generations history chooses to repeat every now and then. The first generation needs a god, and so they invent one. The second erects temples to that god and tries to imitate him. And the third uses the marble from those temples to build brothels in which to worship their own greed, lust, and dishonesty. And that is why gods and heroes are always, inevitably, succeeded by mediocrities, cowards, and imbeciles.

Centuries of make-up that can be smudged by emotion have taught women to control their feelings.

The ghosts of the people we could have been and weren't ... Isn't that what it is? The people we dreamed of being, until we were forced to wake from the dream." She was talking in a monotone, as if reciting from memory a lesson learned long ago. "The ghosts of those whom once we loved but never had, of those who loved us and whose hopes we destroyed out of malice, stupidity, or ignorance.

That was the problem with modern day witches , thought Corso : they didn't have any secrets . Everything was out in the open , you could read all about them in any Who's Who or gossip column . Baronesses or not , they had become predictable , vulgar . Torquemada would have been bored to death by it all .

Films are for everyone, collective, generous, with children cheering when the cavalry arrives. And they're even better on TV: two can watch and comment. But your books are selfish. Solitary. Some of them can't even be read, they fall to bits if you open them. A person who's interested only in books doesn't need other people, and that frightens me

When he stepped into the shower, the hit water scalded him. He let it run over his face, burning his eyelids. He put up with the pain, his jaw clenched and his muscles taut, suppressing the urge to howl with loneliness in the suffocating steam. For four years, one month, and twelve days, Nikon always got into the shower with him after they made love and soaped his back slowly, interminably. And often she put her arms around him, like a little girl in the rain. One day I'll leave without ever really knowing you. You'll remember my big, dark eyes. The reproachful silences. The moans of anxiety as I slept. The nightmares you couldn't save me from. You'll remember all this when I'm gone.