Invano Alvaro Quotes

I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs ... She made them so fast, and so many ... that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

The curious measure, of course, is that we fail to recognize the most obvious notion in all of this: that we ourselves are the best magicians we know. What our bodies do, what our minds accomplish, and the context we can give to things, how we make it all fit together, this is something. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

Life always holds in store surprises that are more complex and unforeseeable than any dream, and the secret is to let them come and not block them with castles in the air. ~ Alvaro Mutis

Political Islam is not a homogeneous bloc. ~ Alvaro De Vasconcelos

But I was in this bowling league with a good number of friends who came from across the line. We got the phone call that the border had been closed, and that absolutely nobody was being allowed to cross
not parents, not children, not anybody. Who knew what disguise the assassin had used. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised ... they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

Tradition is a challenge to innovation.. ~ Alvaro Siza Vieira

and the idea of nothingness - the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling - has, in my dear master's work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous as sunlight upon snowy, unscalable peaks. ~ Alvaro De Campos

he woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to lose its ignorance.

I'm perfectly aware no one's obliged to reciprocate love, and great poets have nothing to do with being great lovers. But there's a transcendent spite...

Let her remain anonymous even to God! ~ Alvaro De Campos

I don't believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations. I don't see the outer universe, I don't hear the outer universe, I don't touch the outer universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. It's not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it's not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it's not with the skin but with the soul that I touch.
And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I'll answer that it's me. ~ Alvaro De Campos

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

I consider a dream like I consider a shadow," answered Caeiro, with his usual divine, unexpected promptitude. "A shadow is real, but it's less real than a rock. A dream is real - if it weren't, it wouldn't be a dream - but less real than a thing. That's what being real is like. ~ Alvaro De Campos

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he's not dead. ~ Alvaro De Campos

He had a ponytail. But this was not a regular ponytail from the Sixties, not a ponytail for show or for fashion. It was more. It was a personal ponytail, something more defining and lasting. A personal thing is different, and all the books and all the magazines in the world can't tell you what that is. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

I will protect all Colombians regardless of whether the attacks come from guerrillas or paramilitaries. ~ Alvaro Uribe

Of course former colonial powers are always more present and influential. They're the ones who need to defend the EU's values on the frontlines. ~ Alvaro De Vasconcelos

Every child likes to take a pencil to make a mark. Everybody makes beautiful things when they are three, four, or five years old. Most people lose that spontaneity; I think that always happens. Some are able to win a second spontaneity. ~ Alvaro Siza

His bread incident was just like my own story of getting run over. I didn't get hurt, exactly, though I did get to see the underside of something I thought I knew but I didn't. My father and I, in our turn, got to see something new in the middle of what was absolutely familiar, which is the hardest place to see it. Neither of us ever forgot. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

Tunisia is extremely dependent on economic conditions in Europe, which is why it also experienced shockwaves from the euro crisis. ~ Alvaro De Vasconcelos

Everything changed when I met the girl. She penetrated a corner of my soul that had been kept sealed and even I didn't know was there. With her gestures, the scent of her skin, her sudden, intense glances that filled me with overwhelming tenderness, with her dependence that was a kind of unthinking, absolute acceptance, she could rescue me instantly from my confusions and obsessions, my discouragement and failure, or my simple daily routine, and leave me inside a radiant circle made of throbbing energy and powerful certainty, like the effects of an unknown drug that produces unconditional happiness. ~ Alvaro Mutis

Sebastian then turned to the redhead. I didn't want to know her name. I already had a perfectly fitting nickname for her in my head. "This is Selena Alvaro." "Please call me Lena," the girl smiled, extending a manicured hand. I shook it politely. Whatever Sebastian's issue was, I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of showing that I cared. "Do you know Bast well?" she asked me.
Ugh. That nickname again. "I guess not," I replied curtly, shooting him a pointed look. "He's just one of the vampires in town. ~ Ada Adams

Since a good part of my life has been wasted dealing with fools just like them, it's not worry I feel but weariness as I watch the approach of one more episode in the old, tired story of men who try to beat life, the smart ones who think they know it all and die with a look of surprise on their faces: at the final moment they always see the truth - they never really understood anything, never held anything in their hands. An old story, old and boring. ~ Alvaro Mutis

When you review the Central American wars or other Latin American wars, you find that there were dictators and there were insurgents. ~ Alvaro Uribe

the Great Vaccination - the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia. ~ Alvaro De Campos

I suddenly asked my master Caeiro, "Are you at peace with yourself?" and he answered, "No, I'm at peace." It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one. ~ Alvaro De Campos

In this place that we live
my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere
rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more ... And it speeds to everyone. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

For security you need more soldiers, you need more policemen, you need more vehicles, you need more planes, you need more guns, you need more communications. ~ Alvaro Uribe

Life with Ilona was invariably lived on two levels, or rather in two simultaneous and parallel directions. On the one hand, your feet were always on the ground, you were always intelligently but not obsessively alert to what each day offered in response to the routine question of surviving. On the other hand, imagination and unbounded fantasy suggested a spontaneous and unexpected sequence of scenarios that were always aimed at the radical subversion of every law ever written or established. This was a permanent, organic, rigorous subversion that never permitted travel on the beaten path, the road preferred by most people, the traditional patterns that offer protection to those whom Ilona, without emphasis or pride but without any concessions either, would call "the others. ~ Alvaro Mutis

Do I believe a thing has limits!? Of course! Nothing exists that doesn't have limits. Existence means there's always something else, and so everything has limits. Why is it so hard to conceive that a thing is a thing, and that it isn't always being some other thing that's beyond it?"

At that moment I felt in my bones not that I was talking to a man, but to another universe. I tried one last time, from another angle, which I felt compelled to consider legitimate.

"Look, Caeiro... think about numbers... Where do they end? Take any number - say 34. Past it we have 35, 36, 37, 38 - there can be no end to it. There is no number so big that there is no number larger..."

"But that's just numbers," protested my master Caeiro.

And then, looking at me out of his formidable, childlike eyes:

"What is 34 in Reality, anyway? ~ Alvaro De Campos

It's wrong to focus only on economic cooperation and then to hope that a sufficiently stable system will become democratic more or less by itself. The EU needs to urge its neighbors to pursue both economic stability and political modernization in equal measures. ~ Alvaro De Vasconcelos

I just want to serve Colombia. ~ Alvaro Uribe

When I get the morning report on security, I call those battalions in the regions where there are problems. ~ Alvaro Uribe

It's stupid, but it's human, and that's how it is. ~ Alvaro De Campos

In the name of justice there cannot be subjection and in the name of peace there cannot be impunity. ~ Alvaro Uribe