Brian Keenan Quotes

We both instinctively knew never to share weakness until we understood it. 'Share only strength' was an unspoken motto between us.

A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships' flags fluttering in the harbour.

This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still.

Cruelty and fear are man-made, and men who perpetrate them are ruled by them. Such men are only half-made things. They live out their unresolved lives by attempting to destroy anything that challenges the void in themselves. A child holds a blanket over its face in fear. A fear-filled man transposes his inadequacy onto another. He blames them, hates them, and hopes to rid himself of his unloved self by hurting, or worse, destroying them.

The accepted view appears to be that Neruda represent the real Chile: a place of poetry, freedom of spirit and international enterprise.