Jorge Amado Quotes

Happiness is pretty boring, hard to take - in a word, a pain in the neck.

It is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated.

Night was running ahead of itself.

I'm under no illusions about the importance of my work. But if it has any worth, it is that it truly reflects the Brazilian people.

Not even God who made us all can kill everybody at once. He kills people one by one, and the more he kills the more people are gonna be born and grow up and go on being born and growing up and mixing, and no son-of-a-bitch is gonna stop 'em!

That's the very reason why love is eternal,' concluded João Fulgêncio, 'because it is forever renewed. Passions die, love remains.

The world is like that
incomprehensible and full of surprises .

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.

They were mistaken if they thought he did not kill her because he loved her too much. At that moment Nacib did not love her. He did not hate her either. He beat her mechanically, as if to relax his nerves from the tension of suffering. He was empty like a vase without a flower. He felt a pain in his heart as if someone were slowly pushing a dagger into it. He felt neither hate nor love. Just pain (366).

I said there are certain flowers that wilt if you put them in a vase' (368).

He wanted her to be as well dressed as the richest lady in Ilhéus; fine clothes would erase her past and hide the stove burns of her arms. But the fine clothes rarely left the closet

He took her as though she were a toy, a toy or a closed rosebud which he brought into bloom each night of pleasure. [She] began to lose her timidity, giving herself over to that lascivious union, growing in response, turning into a heartsome, spirited lover.

Many things I might not write today because I no longer believe them, but I wouldn't change them, since I believed them at the time.

Life was good, one had only to live it.

The whole street took part in the serenade to Flor, Flor leaning against her high window, all ruffles and lace, drenched in moonlight. Down below Vadinho, her gallant knight, with the red rose in his hand, so red it was almost black, the rose of her love.

Does truth lie in the everyday events, the daily incidents, in the pettiness and vulgarity most people's lives are compounded of, or does the truth have its abode in the dream it is given us to dream to flee our sad human condition?

Love
the most wonderful and most terrible thing in the world.

There are certain kinds of flowers-have you ever noticed?-that are beautiful and fragrant as long as they grow in the garden. But if you put them in vases, even silver vases, they wilt and die (272)

But the streets still revealed, along with the progress and future greatness, some remnants of the recent past, of the time of bandits and bloodshed.

Love is not to be proven or measured ... It exists, and that is enough.